Pretty decent debut novel. Protagonist loves to exhale.

People will tell you this book is about a kidnapping -- about the life before for its heroine, Mireille, and about the life after. People will tell you this book about Haiti -- about another lightning rod that divides asunder: class. It is about these things. It's about many other things, also. Depending on who you are, you may need a trigger warning, a stiff drink, a shower when you're reading (and after). I just needed silence. And then I needed to talk. A lot. Not about the book, but about a

Favorite Book of the YearToday I noticed a weird bruise on my finger. After talking myself down from a leukemia diagnosis, I finally figured out it was a Kindle-related injury. I had gripped my Kindle so hard while reading An Untamed State that I bruised my finger. That’s how powerful this book is—it can cause bruises! Puts a whole new meaning to the phrase, “this book is gripping!” To quote another reviewer, what a mother-fucking masterpiece! The book grabs you immediately, and with each chapte...

Disappointing read. Powerful subject matter reduced to Lifetime movie-worthy prose. Gay has a need to make every line a grand pronouncement, every scene worthy of a Tumblr "like." I found the book to be very emotionally manipulative (along the lines of a Nicholas Sparks novel). I hope no one confuses what I'm saying as a critique of emotions pursuant to kidnapping, or rape, or PTSD, or Miri's feelings about the horror she went through. I have no qualms with any of that. I am taking issue with th...

A profound and heart-achingly beautiful novel about one woman's journey through hell and back..I have to start off by saying that this book is not for everyone. There are graphic, sexual assault scenes that could be triggering for certain individuals. This book takes place in Haiti and it details a woman’s experience in captivity. In the beginning of the book, Gay sets a dark overtone for the reader immediately. The protagonist, Miri is dragged out of her car by armed men directly in front of h...

Audiobook: narrated by Robin Miles.... [once again, I love Robin Miles: terrific narrator]Mireille's father left the island of Haiti with nothing and returned with everything..... a wife, children, and wealth. It was easy for her father to overlook Haiti's painful truths- a country of poverty, corruption, heat...and even the gossip of how everyone was into everyone else's business. Mireille's mother remembered--she was resistant to return to Haiti. However, Mireille's mother followed her husband...

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/ “Once upon a time, my life was a fairy tale and then I was stolen from everything I’ve ever loved. There was no happily ever after. After days of dying, I was dead.” You ever find yourself wanting to read something that makes you look a little like this . . . If so, then An Untamed State might be the book for you. While vacationing at her parents’ mansion in Haiti, Mireille and her husband decide to take their baby to the beach....

Once upon a time, in a far-off land, I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones.They held me captive for thirteen days.They wanted to break me.It was not personal.I was not broken.This is what I tell myself. So begins this book. Mireille and her husband Michael along with her toddler son are visiting her family in Haiti. A group of men kidnap...

The reviews and cover blurbs led me to expect a serious literary tale of kidnapping and the class divisions between the wealthy and poor in Haiti. But what I got instead was a Lifetime movie of the week. (There's certainly nothing wrong with Lifetime movies if you know that's what to expect). Chapters alternated between the present day kidnapping and flashbacks to the past, mostly telling the tale of when Mireille and her husband met and married. The scenes with the kidnappers were brutal and gr...

An Untamed Heart by Roxane Gay is a beautifully written novel about one woman's fight to stay alive, set in Haiti Mireille Duval Jameson was kidnapped by a gang of heavily armed men in broad daylight.Mirelle is the daughter of one of the richest men in Haiti she strong willed & will not be beaten but can Mirielle strong will get above the sexual torture she has to endure? or will the kidnappers break her!!This was quite a disturbing read I actually had to go past the sexual abuse when it came ar...

An Untamed State is an extremely hard, brutal, and fierce read. It took me inside the horrible kidnappings going on inside Haiti daily. Searching Google, I found the estimate to be 160 a day. These kidnappings are done to force the wealthy to pay for their loved one's return. The extreme discrepancy between rich and poor in Haiti is astounding. While America is not a third world country, it forced me to think of growing disparities in my own country. Roxane Gay tells the story of one families or...

A truly harrowing story. I listened to the audiobook which was terrific. Well worth the read.4 out of 5 stars

Haiti. "A country of contrast between beauty and brutality". Impoverished. Overpopulated. Oppressed. Unbearable heat. A country’s whose industry is abduction. This is where the story starts. For Mierelle, an American visiting her Haitian family, she becomes the currency being negotiated. Her father refuses to be comply with the $1M ransom. The cost: Thirteen days of sexual and psychological trauma. Thirteen days of dying. A lifetime to recover. In the before, life was a fairytale. In the after,

I won this book through a Goodreads Giveaway. I was excited because I was already familiar with Roxane Gay's writing (fiction & nonfiction), had read Ayiti, and was already a fan. I want to say honestly that this book rattled me. I cried through the last 1/3 and after finishing I was awake for several hours thinking about it. Few books do this for me. I took copious notes while I read. As a reader, I was fully engaged with this story all throughout. Fully there with Mireille and the other charac...

Roxane Gay doesn’t make it easy to recommend her riveting first novel. Set in modern-day Haiti, “An Untamed State” is the story of an American lawyer who’s kidnapped while visiting her rich parents in Port-au-Prince. For more than 200 pages, she’s beaten, burned, sliced and gang-raped. Owing to the power of Gay’s prose, the immediacy of the narrator’s voice and the graphic nature of this ordeal, it’s some of the most emotionally exhausting material I’ve ever read.I have serious reservations abou...

Written in the form of a fairy tale, An Untamed State has two parts: there is the before, when Mirielle and Michael are happy and oblivious and the after, when she has endured the horrific violence of a kidnapping in Haiti. Mirielle and Michael and their infant son, Cristophe, are visiting Mirielle's parents who live in their native Haiti, when she is taken by armed and violent men. Michael is impotent in the face of the assault, as he continues to be. But the real villain in the piece is Miriel...

This is really an appalling book. It appears to be a fictionalization of this kidnapping, http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2011-01-... but Gay transforms the mafia kidnappers into leftist militants and brutal rapists. The resulting story is dominantly disavowed BDSM erotica, but it serves also as reactionary propaganda. The title should tip anyone off to the hackneyed neo-colonial comic that's coming: there's nothing even hipster-ironic here to mitigate the reasserted formula -- Haiti = Savage, and

An Untamed State Roxane Gay, is an American writer, professor, editor, blogger, and commentatorThe U.S. official Government policy concerning the release of prisoners and demands for ransoms reads: The U.S. Government will make no concessions to terrorists holding official or private U.S. citizens hostage. It will not pay ransom, release prisoners, change its policies, or agree to other acts that might encourage additional terrorism. There's of course a significant difference in the way we...

The Hook - ”Once upon a time in a far-off land, I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones.”The Line – ”The people love a real tragedy when they think it cannot happen to them.The Sinker – Many young girls look up to their fathers. Fathers are larger than life, not only in stature but often also in voice. Fathers can do no wrong and in my cas...

I am utterly baffled by these rave reviews. Were we reading the same book? Honestly this reads more like a Sidney Sheldon novel than the timely sociopolitical thriller I thought it would be. The relationship between Mireille and Michael was immature, one dimensional and unrealistic--much like the characters in this book. And as another reader pointed out was the issue of race and how it was portrayed in such a simplistic, clumsy, and dare say, slavish adoration of the white American male. It fel...