Review by Booklist Review
Gibson is best known for co-hosting the Throwing Shade podcast, in which she and fellow comedian Bryan Safi dissect news affecting women and the gay community with a sense of righteous, anger-filled absurdity. That sensibility carries into her first book, a collection of essays about the damage wrought by the patriarchy that will have like-minded readers laughing because she's funny, and crying because it's true. From the prevalence of the May/December romance in the media to an alarming and hilarious letter to Betsy DeVos about campus sexual assault to Mike Pence and his ""Christian mullet"" (""religion in the front, evil in the back""), Gibson attacks far-right hypocrisy with frenetically on-target similes. She writes frankly about female anatomy and sexuality, particularly her own, to combat the notion that things like menstruation and ill-advised sex partners are best not discussed. Gibson uses her very presence as an act of defiance she's a loud Southern lady with size-11 feet who grew up poor white trash and readers will be grateful that she can't keep her mouth shut.--Susan Maguire Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In her edgy, fierce, and funny debut essay collection, comedian and Throwing Shade podcast cohost Gibson serves up scathing wit and graphic observations on the "insane ways people try to control" women. Part memoir, part consciousness-raising handbook, the 18 essays repackage "lady sadness into digestible comedy." In an essay about common types of gender traitors (everyone from Phyllis Schlafly to "Your Mom's Worst Friend, Deborah"), she opines, "Women make life (more) terrible for other women because they haven't gotten the memo about it being retrograde as fuck." In another, she urges women to divest from male-owned makeup companies and stores and dispenses tips about women-owned makeup products to switch to. Elsewhere, she addresses a profane and funny open letter to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, schooling her on statistics around campus rape and asking her to reinstate protections against it. Several entries reprise commentaries from her podcast, but Gibson adds context with tales of her Christian upbringing in Texas and misspent early adulthood. The result is a bubbly acid bath of clever invective encouraging her fellow women to make the world a better place. Agent: Hannah Brown Gordon, Foundry Literary + Media. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Channeling absurdity into activism: blunt, woman-centered comedic essays aimed at generating female resistance and mutual support.Throwing Shade podcast co-host and Funny or Die writer Gibson felt all fired up after reading Susan Faludi, so she decided to write a book about the beleaguered state of women in this country. A self-proclaimed "feminasty" whose superpower is "repackaging lady sadness into digestible comedy," the author leverages her outspoken Southern persona and her less conventionally feminine characteristics (including a predilection for swearing and gross-out humor) as weapons in the fight for gender parity. In a series of rambling, casual essays, Gibson rages against those she sees as having committed or enabled crimes against women, with the most vituperation reserved for right-wing journalists and politicians, especially Mike Pence and Betsy DeVos. She unleashes a stand-up comedian's audacity and calculated obscenity on recent topics like the legislative rollbacks on rape and abortion, the #MeToo backlash, and breast cancer profiteering, punctuated by her own bitterly hilarious tales of woe. She thinks we should all, male and female, be talking more about labia and herpes and teenage sex. The rhetorical purposes of the work are clear: Gibson seeks to lift up women at every opportunity, especially by changing the gender balance in political power: "We wait out their term, helping women who are in the crosshairs of their villainous laws. Then, we flush them out with a sea of overqualified women who won't forget what they did to us." In keeping with her goal that women pursue a "closed female monetary system" wherever possible, she offers a series of surprisingly earnest reviews of specific cosmetics from women-owned companies. Like much topical satire, the book would likely benefit from a live or recorded reading. Gibson is still sussing out her transition to the printed page, and this debut embodies her trademark awkwardness, but she speaks to a generation of women too angry to accept any cultural commentary that isn't somewhat raw and deadly sincere under its veneer of sarcasm.Flawed but funny diatribes from an emerging comedic voice. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
