Traumatic Violence

Violet Forney

Traumatic Violence

The Female of the Species
Mindy McGinnis

What are the consequences of traumatic experiences on the human psyche?

In, The Female of the Species, the protagonist, Alex Craft, struggles to deal with the loss of her sister who was kidnapped and murdered three years prior. Her killer was never caught but Alex knows who it was. Although she gets distracted from her main goal of finding the killer by new friendships and a love interest, the violence that is inside of her remains. Throughout the story, the reader views Alex’s fight to control the anger and darkness inside of her while trying to find justice for her sister.

This book may be a good read for any avid mystery fan that is comfortable reading dark and tragic stories. The story itself was interesting and Alex’s relentless chase of this seemingly evasive killer was exciting. The book requires a certain level of maturity to see through the irrelevant and distasteful parts of Alex’s journey.

Personally, I am not a mystery fan and have found that I do not possess the level of maturity required to enjoy this book and prevent myself from being distracted by inappropriate details. The overall darkness of the story was prevalent for my liking. The story, as original as it was, disturbed me. The book takes a look inside the head of a violent bloodthirsty young girl and well some readers may find that interesting, it was too evil of a subject for me to comprehend. The murder of Alex’s sister, along with the kidnapping and torture that led up to her death, was described in great detail. This gruesome imagery forced me to turn unread pages again and again until the author moved on to a different, lighter topic. Whatever the message that the author was trying to convey by writing this book was clouded by the wickedness of the protagonist’s thoughts and actions. Scenes irrelevant to the plot lasted too long for my taste and were a distraction from the true message of the story. A certain scene about the main character working with her friend Peekay at an animal shelter lasted for ten whole pages. It was of no relevance to Alex’s quest of finding her killer and was extremely lengthy and boring to read. I did not check out this book to read about two volunteers at an animal shelter stocking shelves and taking the trash out. This book was written as a mystery and I expected the author to write about the plot and try to entice the reader by creating a sense of excitement throughout the book as Alex Craft embraced her inner anger. The author instead, strayed from the plot line and bored me with unnecessary scenes that were of no importance to the development of the characters or the story. I also did not particularly enjoy the tone in which the book was written, that is in the perspectives of three different, and in no way unique, characters. I liked that this choice allowed me, as the reader to view certain situations in the story from different perspectives but the characters all had mostly the same view on the things that happened. Each character seemed to know the others secrets at the beginning and the different chapters usually did not include the characters views on certain things. Instead, each chapter was written by a different character the was recounting the things that were happening in their own life.

The author attempted to create a realistic voice for the characters but it ended up sounding like the book was written by two moody teenage girls and an unintelligent football player in the midst of his tenth concussion.