Ava Reid is one of my favourite authors. After reading and loving A Study in Drowning, I fell in love with Reid's writing.

Unfortunately, I think it was me and not the book that made me not love this. Lady Macbeth follows our main character who must navigate life as the wife of Macbeth, while dealing with the sexist ideals of the society. There is darkness, madness, mystery and prophecies that made me want to pick this up, but I was wary as I never do well with retellings.

This book was DARK. I found Lady Macbeth's character to be quite eerie at times- her thoughts toward those around her consisted of the best way for her to gain power. I would've enjoyed it more if we had explored her history and her childhood a little more. I found her relationship with Lisander to be quite swift, but the chemistry was definitely there in their relationship which made me want them to get together.

The position of women in this world was scary. Treated as servants, wives or objects, we are constantly shown how women are overpowered by men. Lady Macbeth- Roscille- is first controlled by her father, then her husband, and much later by her husband's men as they blackmail her adultery. As a result it made me want to root for her even more, and I found myself wanting her to get revenge, which she eventually does.

The hidden plot twist did surprise me towards the end, as I'm somewhat familiar with the original tale, but not by much. I found the writing to be beautiful and whimsical. The imagery was quite strong when it came to the gory scenes and it made me want to keep reading. By the end I was a little disappointed at the lack of tension and pacing, but overall this was an enjoyable read.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the e-arc! Pick this up if you enjoy vivid imagery, strong female characters, revenge stories and gorgeous writing!

This is my first Ava Reid book (I actually have The Wolf and the Woodsman on my TBR), so I was keen to see where she’d take me. This one takes you to some dark places, so readers beware!

This is very atmospheric - I enjoyed how Lady Macbeth, Roscille, has her own story. Reid sets her as a young (only 17!) bride to Lord Macbeth with her own baggage as the power to turn men insane by simply staring into their eyes. She’s feared by many to be a witch (very ironic given Macbeth’s alignment with a witchy trio) and spends most of her time hidden behind veils.

I will say that the pacing for this one was a bit slow in parts. But the machinations of the scheming and plotting to overthrow (and assassinate kind Duncane) really pulled me along. And just when you think you know where it’s going (if you’ve read the Macbeth play - you’ll only know a fraction of this story) it did a 360 and took me in a different direction. Particularly at the 2/3 part into the story. I was not expecting that!!

The first thing you need to know about this book is that it is not Shakespeare's Macbeth and it doesn't pretend to be. If you're expecting a retelling of that exact story from a different point of view, I'm here to tell you that that's not what you're getting - and really, why would you want that?

This tale is inspired by Macbeth but has very key differences so you don't know exactly how it's going to end, which makes it all the more enthralling.

Ava Reid crafts a story of witchcraft, superstition, deceit and hidden bravery all from the point of view of a young Lady Macbeth, thrust into a world she doesn't understand.

I've seen reviews saying that this version of Lady Macbeth is weak but in reality, I think she has a different type of strength, as well as a multi-dimensional character. Her strength and will grow throughout the book as she is tested in more brutal ways.

I also love that the end is more deserving for a strong woman.

As ever, Reid's writing is beautiful and evocative, creating beautiful physical descriptions but also a strong emotional sense of what her characters are going through. It's this that really stays with you, makes you so invested and means you can't put the book down.

It is a beautiful interpretation of a well-loved story that refuses to tread all of the same ground.

A beautifully written reimagining of The Scottish Play from the perspective of Lady Macbeth herself. I enjoyed this a lot, the writing was just so good and having watched several Macbeth adaptations as well as studying it in school, this brings new life to the play and focused on themes of vengeance, cycles of trauma and women's roles in a very patriarchal time. The ways that Lady Macbeth differed from the traditional Shakespeare were really interesting, a 17 year old Lady Macbeth and the introduction of monster romance actually worked really well I think and lent it a surreal, Angela Carter, fairytale feel. This isn't a five star read for me, as I think some of the execution of the themes were a bit heavy handed which contrasted with how beautiful and well crafted the writing is. I also found a lot of the characters (apart from Lady Macbeth) were a bit lacklustre. However there is still a lot to recommend this and it's a great read!

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for an e-ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I had high hopes for this: like most people, Lady Macbeth was one of the first properly complex female characters I studied in high school English, so a retelling of her story is one that I have always been eager to read. Reid’s writing style is sharp and atmospheric, and certainly fits the dark and moody narration that one would expect from a reimagination of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Admittedly, this is quite a different retelling of Lady Macbeth’s story than I expected: Reid has turned the original archetype of Lady Macbeth on its head - opting to forgo Shakespeare’s characterisation of her as a master manipulator and evil temptress who drives herself and her husband into madness, and instead presenting her as a young, innocent and deeply exploited 17-year-old woman trapped within a rigid patriarchal order, and forced to carry out the violent motivations of men around her (rather than the other way around!). However, this perhaps makes it an even more interesting and worthy read, especially if you’re interested in looking at Shakespeare’s Macbeth through a feminist lens! I’ll definitely be looking into Reid’s other/future books too now…

DNF
I loved Macbeth but this is not at all what I had hoped for from a Lady Macbeth retelling. The foreword explaining that Reid would intentionally be interchanging names and places throughout should have been warning enough that this wouldn't be my cup of tea. The pace was non existent and the vitriol towards Scotsmen alarming.

This just didn't work for me. The iteration of Lady Macbeth that Ava Reid has given us is a boiler-plate heroine, who has far less to say about the subversion of gender norms than the original character crafted 500 years ago. Even when not compared to Shakespeare’s masterpiece this book falls flat, there's very little originality here and little to remember.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for this ARC copy. This dark, brooding twist on the story of Macbeth is captivating and well paced from the start. I loved the characterisation of Lady Macbeth and her moral ambiguity in a difficult time/situation. I definitely recommend this book if you enjoy an atmospheric gothic tale and it would be best read on a dark winter's night in front of a crackling log fire.

I was excited about this book. But sadly this just didn't work for me.
While the writing felt slow and dragging. My main issue was the story itself. This is marketed as a retelling but Lady Macbeth's character doesn't really fit Lady Macbeth. Which kept taking my enjoyment from the overall story.
Maybe this would have worked better if just inspired and not a retelling.

I found this one very odd. It is the second retelling of Lady Macbeth's story I have read recently and no doubt I will read Val McDermid's upcoming Queen Macbeth to round out the set. There will always be liberties taken in historical fiction, especially when that history has already been most famously (and famously inaccurately) told by Shakespeare, but I found it inexplicable that Reid would remove all of Lady Macbeth's known history and change her into a French woman married to the famous king. It's slightly more complicated than that but I won't give anything more away, needless to say, this change threw me off from the start. It is a retelling very much in Shakespeare's vein, in that in mixes the supernatural and historical and is written in that non-quite-YA-not-quite-adult way that seems prevalent at the moment. The content is adult but the writing has an adolescent cast, especially in the realm of interpersonal relationships, that means it will sit awkwardly with some readers. There is also a lot of derogatory language directed at the Scottish characters, definitely accurate for the time-period and the perspective of a Frenchwoman but jarring in the very modern writing style and the fact that the Scottish characters live up to their barbarous blood-and-spittle perception at every turn almost every turn. Except of course the love interest and the less said about that bizarre turn of events the better! After a while it becomes obvious that the story Reid wanted to tell has been shoehorned into the most basic shell of the Macbeth story, I'm perplexed as to why she didn't just tell the story she wanted to without having to pay lip service to Shakespeare or any historical or physical reality of Scotland.

As previous reviews already mentioned, I too was excited about this title and was greatly disappointed. I cannot say I was a fan of Ava Reid's writing previously, but Lady Macbeth is one of my favourite literary characters so I was absolutely intrigued about the premise promising a feminist-heavy novel dedicated entirely to her perspective, and in the Gothic genre no less. Unfortunately, any resemblance to the dubious, power-seeking, grey villainous character that Lady Macbeth is in the original work is sorely missing. Quite the opposite. Reid's portrayal of Lady Macbeth does her a great disservice. Alas.

Thank you to Randomhouse UK Cornerstone and Netgalley for providing me an ARC for this book.

Unfortunately this didn't work for me at all. I thought Lady Macbeth was this impressive, cunning, strong character but in this book she was portrayed by a simpering 17 year old who was merely led by men and comletely unable to come up with her own ideas/opinions. I think this book did more telling rather than showing and it just caused me to feel disconnected to the character due to the amount of discrepancy in the idea of Rosille and what was actually happening. I especially felt this, whenever she was described as extremely smart and clever and then proceeded to make the most idiotic decisions or say the most idiotic things.

Also not really sure why there is some dude that can turn into a dragon and also whats the whole magic system/witch circle thing about? I just felt like this was all over the place and absolutely not for me.

What an amazing book and I thought I couldn’t enjoy a book more than a study in drowning but wow! Lady Macbeth is just beyond words! Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of this book.

DNF at 28%

I'm a huge Shakespeare nerd - I've seen almost every play he's written - and Macbeth is one of my favourites. The conniving, fabulous, iconic Lady Macbeth is one of my favourite characters ever written. You can imagine my excitement to hear that Ava Reid was coming out with a book about her, but Reid's Lady Macbeth bears little resemblance to the titular character.

Reid is a wonderful writer. I'm a sucker for gloomy, atmospheric books and she captures this perfectly. However, that's about the only good thing I can say about it. I think this book really suffers from its relation to Shakespeare's masterpiece. I cannot imagine how difficult it is to write a reimagining of one of the most famous characters in literature, and I think I can see what Reid was trying to do, however I really think she missed the mark. Roscille is all over the place - she's so incredibly flat and has no charisma or personality. She's meek and unintelligent - basically everything that Lady Macbeth is not. I cannot speak to a character arc or growth as I didn't finish the book, but from what I've seen she remains the same flat uninteresting character throughout the story. There is no universe in which I can believe she becomes the Lady Macbeth we all know (and in my case, love) and that's the biggest failure of this book. When you fail with the main character, everything else about the book fails too.

Lady Macbeth is a huge swing and miss from an otherwise solid writer. I'm curious to see what she does next, but this book is the biggest disappointment of the year so far for me.

It was…alright. It is supposed to be a retelling of Macbeth but the characters bear little resemblance to the play. And the protagonist is not nearly as wily or clever enough to give you that feeling Lady Macbeth has. As a historical fantasy it is interesting but nothing special, Not a patch on a study in drowning,

I've loved the original Macbeth by Shakespeare ever since I read it at school. This made me a little cautious going into this retelling.

What if a retelling from Lady Macbeth's perspective ruined my love of the story?

What if Lady Macbeth got pushed out from being my favourite character in the original story by this reimagined version of her character?

Turns out these concerns were completely unnecessary because:

Ava Reid was born to write this retelling!

Within this version of Macbeth's story, we get an atmospheric and claustrophobic feeling of women being trapped within the confines of men. We get a deeply descriptive prose that makes each feeling the character expresses pour out of the page onto the reader. We have a version of Lady Macbeth that conforms to all the wise and cunning personality from the original, but with a delicacy and fragility that completely humanises her, endearing her towards the reader.

I love Reid's version of Lady Macbeth: the voice she has been given, a personality more befitting to her name, a character arc that left me enthralled more and more as I turned each page. And an ending more true to what she deserved.

This is a Lady Macbeth story truly befitting of a queen.

DNF. I think this book is largely mis-marketed, because you might - like me - think that it's about Lady Macbeth. And to a degree it is, but to a further degree, it's really not. I found the language and how the writing was used to tell the story incredibly off-putting and difficult to follow. I knew I was sunk when I saw a glossary at the very beginning of the book. I don't want to be constantly referring back and forth to work out what you're trying to say as you tell this story. You can still achieve the same level of atmosphere without completely confusing the reader throughout. I've never read Ava Reid before and I have seen reviewers mention that this is very different to the style of her other books, so I might have a better shot there. Unfortunately, this one just wasn't for me.

📚 review 📚
lady macbeth - ava reid

this is one of the darkest, gorgeously written gothic stories i’ve read for a long time but it isn’t for everyone.
firstly this is a very different lady macbeth to the one we know and love. while shakespeare’s lady macbeth is the ultimate hbic this one is young, naive and definitely not subtle in her machinations. while i enjoy ava reid’s writing and this one is just as rich as her other books, there are a few things i didn’t enjoy - there seems to be a little bit of an anti scottish feeling which is odd when this is a retelling of one of the most famous scottish stories in the world.
my other criticism would be that this is marketed as being a feminist retelling - and though we do have elements of this a lot of the action is dependent on the men in the story, which does over shadow the feminism that we were promised.
overall though i thought it was a fairly enjoyable take on a shakespearean classic, full of iconic characters that we get to see in a new way.

thank you @netgalley for the early copy

Really disappointed with this one as my last Ava Reid was 5 stars!

I'll start off with the positives - the prose is good. I love Ava Reid's writing, and she creates a really gothic, gloomy atmosphere and sense of suspense. It was what kept me reading even though I wasn't enjoying much else about it!

I would say the choice to characterise Lady Macbeth in this way is a strange one. She's very meek and powerless for the majority of the book, and I was hoping she'd have a powerful character arc that brought her closer to the OG Lady Macbeth, but she felt almost exactly the same at the end of the book as she did at the beginning.
We're constantly told she's wily and clever but I saw no evidence for this - I couldn't tell you one time where she was scheming effectively and it influenced the plot. The plot and her character are both pulled along by men - and there's so many men. There's 2 other women in the whole book (besides the witches), but they appear very briefly. Are you saying the whole castle is run by men? Why is that? I can't think of a practical reason they wouldn't employ women as servants, the only reason I can think of is that it's serving to isolate Roscille more than she is already.
The fantasy elements felt wishy washy as well. There were so many times when I'd be reading like hello?? don't you have magical eyes??? whip your veil off!! Or when she got given a key to the basement with the witches and didn't even think to utilise them while she was left on her own to run the castle???
I think the another issue I had is that I still don't know Roscille's goals other than to escape(?) and even then I'm not sure. She doesn't seem to want anything throughout the book, and is only driven by what she does not want. It's a choice, but I think it makes for a very weak character, especially a Lady Macbeth.
Finally my biggest issue - what in the xenophobia?? I understand the temptation to create an atmospheric gothic environment by writing Scotland like that but the other characters made me really uncomfortable and offended. Lady Macbeth, aka Roscille is French and has Never Done Anything Wrong In Her Whole Life. EVERY Scottish man she interacts with is a violent brute, ready to rape and murder. The only semi-decent man she interacts with is half English. I know that the play itself is full of violent people and it's set in a very different time, but also this is a fantasy book. Are you telling me all your other characters only have 1 setting? It's not even just because it's through the lens and judgement of the French main character (although this is part of the reason), it's just that they're Like That. I really hated it, and would have loved to see some more variation.

This was a DNF for me at 32%. As this is my first time reading anything by Ava Reid, I was really excited to jump into the retelling. Unfortunately it fell quite short for me and did not live up to expectations I had for it. The storytelling was brilliant but I just couldn’t get my head around it and I think I spoilt myself by reading other reviews first to get a feel for the book.