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Overview
This is not a book for everyone, but its admirers are vigorously enthusiastic. For example:Rhoda Koenig in New York Magazine, who calls it ". . . a novel of blazingly hot revenge, one that amply illustrates the saying about heaven having no rage like love turned to hate, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned."
Or Rosalyn Drexler, who said on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, "It affords a scintillating, mindboggling, vicarious thrill for any reader who has ever fantasized dishing out retribution for one wrong or another."
Or Carol E. Rinzler, who wrote on The Washington Post Book World's front page, ". . . what makes this a powerfully funny and oddly powerful book is the energy of the language and of the intellect that conceived it, an energy that vibrates off the pages and that makes SHE-DEVIL as exceptional a book in the remembering as in the reading . . . . a small, mad masterpiece."
Synopsis
A scathing satire of an image-conscious society, Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil is the story of Ruth, an graceless, unattractive woman. Trapped in a loveless marriage with a cruelly indifferent, philandering husband named Bobbo, Ruth finds herself sinking under the weight of crushed expectations and neglect.
Chicago Tribune
'Fantastic...a carefully worked-out fable, satiric and finally bitter...Just about everyone in this novel is selfish and horrid, but Weldon tells her story with infectious, wicked glee. Just 'how' Ruth manages her revenge on Bobbo, Mary Fisher and the brats is what makes this malicious parable so palatable. And it's very funny.