This book was such a disappointment for me. It still gets 3 stars because I love Ava Reid's prose and style of writing but the actual plot of this book was hard to get through.

Presented as a Macbeth reimagining/retelling, I don't expect it to follow the original story exactly (frankly I would prefer it didn't) but Reid made an interesting choice right off the bat to change Lady Macbeth from a middle aged Scottish woman to a seventeen year old French girl. From what I remember of the original story, Lady Macbeth is fierce, manipulative and ends up the queen of Scotland. This young Lady Macbeth, does try to be manipulative (mainly using sex as a weapon) and men are afraid of her because her eyes are rumored to induce madness in men. Reid also makes this young girl go through an IMENSE about of abuse (check the TW) that almost reaches an unnecessary point. While I don't deny that, historically, women have been through some sh*t, it felt like abuse for the sake of abuse and to make the "brute" Scottish men seem even worse rather than something that led to her growth and empowerment.

I have seen others critique it but Reid does also really hammer down two things: man bad, woman good. Scottish man especially bad. I'm always here for a feminist moment but this book literally doesn't pass the Bechdel test. Lady Macbeth only has two female friends, both her maids, and both are so minimal. The only man who seems to have any redeeming qualities is English and even then, he is a literal monster.

As I was reflecting on it, I thought about the other two books I've read by Reid (A Study in Drowning and Juniper and Thorn) and while both had dark themes, violence, and women in abusive situations, this book just did not have anything extra that made the experience enjoyable. I truly didn't find any of the characters likable other than maybe the 3 witches who are barely human.

All of that to say, read it if you want because mileage may vary.

I’ll preface the review by saying that I absolutely adored and devoured The Wolf and the Woodsman and A Study in Drowning, so as soon as I heard that Ava Reid was doing a Macbeth retelling, I was foaming at the bits. This was one of my most highly anticipated reads of the year, which makes me so disappointed to say that it did not deliver.

For me, Lady Macbeth fails utterly as a Macbeth retelling and was unrecognizable to me if it weren’t for the characters’ names.

The original Lady Macbeth is a ruthless woman who spurs her reluctant husband to war. This is the same iconic character who said, “fill me from the crown to the toe, top full/ Of direst cruelty.” Instead this Lady Macbeth is a timid French girl who blushes and swoons and whose internal monologue constantly consists of her complaining about the barbarism of Scottish customs.

This change was baffling to me. How are readers supposed to care about a civil war when its participants are portrayed as brutish and sub-human? There's no emotional gravity regarding the death of kinsmen because it’s told from the point of view from a foreigner who disdains them (aside from Duncan’s eldest son). This sucks so much of the emotional conflict and heart from the story.

As for Macbeth himself, he’s turned into an abusive husband who has zero qualms about killing his family and fellow countrymen. Where is the guilt? Where is the moral grappling with the weight of his decisions? He also has no compelling motivations for becoming king aside from witches telling him so.

Now, I did like the concept of granting Lady Macbeth supernatural powers. She can induce madness in men with her stare and use compulsion with her voice (similar to the Bene Gesserit). However, I wish this had actually been utilized more and it still wasn’t enough to redeem the rest of the book for me.

Ava Reid has a flair for retelling classic stories and making them sing a new song, so I was really excited to check Lady Macbeth out. Reid has reimagined a female character who has always been portrayed as a villain and cast her as a heroine fighting back against the patriarchy. Highly recommend to everyone to give this book a shot!

5/5 Stars

TL;DR - A breathtaking, illuminating retelling, brimming with atmosphere and soul, and with pure, feminine rage. Ava Reid does it again!

Big thanks to Random House, Ballantine, Del Rey, and NetGalley for providing the ARC for this book in exchange for an honest review!

***Trigger Warnings for: rape (off-page/implied), threatened rape, violence, blood, sexism and misogyny, mentioned forced abortion, imprisonment and forced servitude, stabbing, mentioned violence towards animals, suicidal ideation and attempted suicide, choking/strangulation, mentioned death in childbirth, torture (whipping, crude lobotomy), drowning, and mentioned infanticide.***

Death-touched. Poison-eyed. Witch-kissed.

‘Lady Macbeth’ by Ava Reid is a retelling of Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ from the perspective of the titular lady, Roscille. Given to the brute Macbeth as a bride at just 17 years old, Roscille must use her wiles and her latent magics — the power to drive men mad with her gaze — to preserve her own life, and those of the people she comes to love.

(I need to preface this review by saying I know *nothing* about the original play besides the fact that you’re not supposed to say the name during *any* stage production, so I can’t comment on whether or not it’s a faithful retelling. If you’re familiar with the source material, your mileage may vary.)

Another straight-up banger from Ava Reid, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. I enjoyed ‘A Study In Drowning’ when I received an ARC copy last year (5-stars, can’t wait for the sequel!), so I knew that I already vibed with her writing style and storytelling flavor, so it’s no surprise at all that I LOVED this book. I’m a sucker for a good feminist retelling, and this book delivered — and then some.

Reid knows how to write good prose — it’s simple and clean, and very much straight to the point, but that doesn’t detract from just how deeply the prose goes. It’s atmospheric, it’s clever, and it’s, more often than not, heartbreaking in its bleak depiction of the life of a medieval woman. I pretty much highlighted this entire book for how many lines hit so hard and spoke to me personally.

Roscille is such a compelling protagonist, and I very much enjoyed her journey from meek bride to powerful Queen. Does she always make good choices? No, but she’s *seventeen*, and I think that her actions, good and bad, smart and dumb, were believable and interesting.

(And, all of her guile and shortcomings have earned her a coveted spot on my “I Support Women’s Wrongs” shelf! Slay, Queen!)

To everyone who keeps writing “feminist” retellings, please read this book, digest it, read it again, dissect it, take notes, and do what Ava did. This is how you do it.

I don’t have much else to say, because I devoured this book so fast that I didn’t really have time to stop and take notes. And, as with Reid’s previous books, there’s really not a lot for me to pick apart, because everything is just done so *well*. I will say, though, I genuinely didn’t want to keep reading sometimes, just because I was enjoying the book so much that I wanted to savor it slowly, like a rich dessert or a fine wine. This, of course, was constantly at war with my need to know what happens, to see how Roscille outwitted her husband, to know whether or not she succeeds in her plans. And again, this book does *not* disappoint.

Final Thoughts:

The best book I’ve read so far this year, and likely the best I’ll read all year. Immediately pre-ordering a hard copy after I upload this review. 5/5,10/10, Ava, take all my money, forever.

I love a retelling and this one hit the nail on the head. This was hard to understand at times because I kept forgetting who everyone was BUT I couldn't put this down. The witchy vibes were everything. Lady Macbeth gets a voice and when she learns how to use it - watch out.

This one was unfortunately a miss for me. Lady Macbeth was a highly anticipated read for me as I've loved all of Reid's other works. I'm not big on Shakespeare retellings so I should've guessed this wouldn't be for me. Lady Macbeth has many similarities with the author's previously published books including tone and atmosphere. However this book learned too much into literary fiction for my tastes.

"Let them call you witch, as they do any woman who professes strength."

I absolutely loved every part of this book. The writing is beautiful, the story is incredibly compelling. It felt like the perfect homage to the Macbeth story but instead centers women and goes against narratives of servitude, motherhood and marriage. I wish I could go back and reread it for the first time. I've already preordered my hardcopy - this book will stay with me for a long, long time.

Overall I liked the book, but I couldn't get past the retelling as a drastically different version of what I though Lady MacBeth could be. Maybe it was my expectations, but I overall I wished the overall attitude/personality of Lady Macbeth was more strong, instead of feeling scared under Macbeth's wrath (so to speak). The plot moved well and I was satisfied with the ending.

Prefacing this by saying that A) I have a deep personal and emotional investment in Shakespeare, adaptations (specifically of the young adult variety) and adaptation theory, and Lady Macbeth (all of which I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on) and B) I was very excited to read this book until about 2 days ago. That being said: I do not recommend reading this if you are in alignment with anything I said in point A.

This book takes everything that Shakespeare does well with Lady Macbeth and somehow takes it all away from her until about the last 15 pages. Our “fiend-like queen” is nowhere to be seen in the book aside from being associated with being a witch, and even then, she comes nowhere close to the infamous manipulative and power/blood-hungry queen we know and love. Roscille, our Lady Macbeth character, is a seventeen-year-old girl who is apparently the only beautiful woman in the world according to the descriptions of the few other female characters Reid introduces. She also is very small and lithe, as compared to Macbeth, who is described several times as being huge, monstrous, and colossal. I get that the point there was to make the power dynamic between Macbeth and Roscille physically noticeable, but it didn’t really do much for me.

Lady Macbeth is a character that has been reimagined in so many media pieces, and with each one (at least those which aren’t trying to adhere closely to the source material, as the case is with A24’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) and the 2015 film), what seems to be the goal is to give her some more agency and power in her life. From the synopsis, I gathered that this would be the case with this book: “But the Lady does not know her husband has occult secrets of his own. She does not know that prophecy girds him like armor. She does not know that her magic is greater and more dangerous, and that it will threaten the order of the world.” Nowhere in the book do I feel that Roscille rises to this. She is weak and fragile in comparison to her source material and to literally every other character. She stands up for herself maybe twice excluding the final scene, and even then, she is not unwavering in the way that I expected her to be. In fact, every good Lady Macbeth moment that I was hoping to see make an appearance in this book was either given to Macbeth (a slight that had me rolling my eyes and aggravated), or simply not there. Gone is Lady Macbeth, who mocks her husband for his weakness and his fears. Roscille is not nearly at the level of ruthlessness as the Lady Macbeth who says “My hands are of your color, but I shame / To wear a heart so white.” She does not encourage and feed the ambition of her husband. Instead, she sits idly by while he does everything. This is not a Lady Macbeth who is taking charge of her life and her power, it is one who is further suffocated than her death in Shakespeare’s play leaves her.

The treatment of the witches in this book literally made me put it down and take a deep breath. The witches are characters that are so intriguing and highly underused in the source material and I love to see them played with in adaptations with their appearances and in how they interact with the narrative. Reid’s Macbeth keeps them chained in his basement. Considering how Roscille is treated for being cursed by a witch or seen as a witch, this doesn’t shock me, but the premise of this being Macbeth keeping them there to seek counsel from (one of the witches he even has a personal connection to) is so absurd to me. It seems that Ava Reid’s female characters when not her FMC tend to fall into this trap of sorts, where they are similarly imprisoned by (as with Angharad in ASID) or killed (as in this book) and the only one that can save them or empathize with them are the FMC. I hate to say this, but it feels like lazy writing to continue to rehash the same things across different narratives.

This is my second Ava Reid book, the first being A Study in Drowning, and it’s easy to see the further similarities between the two. In both, she features weird racial-prejudice plot lines (in this book, Roscille describes the Scots as brutish and violent, especially in reference to Macbeth where in ASID, it was with the Argantians) and doesn’t really do the work of getting into why her main characters feel this way and it’s never actually resolved. The only character that Roscille seems to be okay with that is Scottish (and isn’t even fully Scottish) is Lisander, who also happens to be the Only Good Man of the book (he still really isn’t a good man but that’s just my opinion). This was done as well in ASID where Preston was the Only Good Man to Effy. It’s clear to me that Reid likes to play around with the power dynamics between men and women and the ways that manifests in different fantasy and historical settings, however returning to these same tropes/character archetypes/character beliefs etc. gets old and repetitive, and honestly has turned me off of trying her other books.

This book should not have been tied to Macbeth at all, in my opinion. Invoking Shakespeare, whether it be him as a person, his name, or any of his works, carries weight in literary circles, even if you do not intend it to. Clearly it was intended here, but I view it as a major mistake and disservice to the narrative that has been crafted. If Reid wanted to write a historical fantasy, there were so many better ways to do so than embarking on a character assassination quest of Lady Macbeth. This book could have stood on its own, without any of the Macbeth ties, and at points, it even felt like it could have been something completely different if not for the names and specific setting used (also: what was the deal with the dragon?????). Reid’s prose is pretty and at times a little cliché, but it just does not allow for the book to redeem itself from everything I’ve mentioned above.

TL;DR: If you’re looking for a Macbeth adaptation that allows Lady Macbeth to claim the power and agency that she deserves, this is not the book for you. (I saw someone recommend Queen Hereafter as a better alternative. I will absolutely be checking that one out.) If you’re not familiar with Macbeth and/or don’t have a connection to the source material, maybe you’ll enjoy this.

to secure an alliance, roscille is given to lord macbeth. as she becomes lady macbeth, she discovers her own power, while not realizing her husband has some dangerous secrets.

i have to throw out the disclaimer that i’ve never read macbeth or seen it performed. so, i went into this book only knowing that “macbeth” is the name you never say in a theater. however, i absolutely adore ava reid, and the synopsis sounded amazing, so i was eager to read this!

if there’s one thing i love, it’s villainous/morally grey female main characters. it’s safe to say this book delivered on that front! it was interesting to see her go from roscille, a girl forced to cover her eyes in fear she’d bewitch those around her, to lady macbeth, who used her power for her own gain.

overall, i thought this was a great book and i’d recommend it to fans of adult historical fantasy!

Thank you for the opportunity to read and review. 2.5 stars rounded up.

This is not the review I expected to be writing. Neither for an Ava Reid book nor for a retelling of one of my favorite Shakespeare works.

First, this is not a retelling. It’s a reimagining. Too much of what we know of Shakespeare’s ambitious, conniving, and confident Lady Macbeth is changed in this timid, teenage version whose moves backfire on her to be considered a retelling.

Given my experiences with other Ava Reid books I was so excited for this and expected to fly through it. It took me two attempts to read it, and the second successful one took a while to get through. Several times while reading this book, I told my bookstore coworker, also a Macbeth fan, that it felt like the author was telling me everything and showing nothing. Something along the lines of listening to a lecture — “This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened…” All telling, and almost no action whatsoever.

The book starts with 17 year old Roscille, the soon to be Lady Macbeth, arriving in Scotland from her native France to be married to Macbeth as arranged by Macbeth and Roscille’s duke father. After being stripped of her handmaiden she’s plunged into a strictly masculine world void of other females for most of the book, and she proceeds to spend her time coming up with every possible method to get her husband away from Glammis to avoid being taken to his bed. Unlike the master manipulator we know as the original Lady Macbeth, however, most of Roscille’s plans fall apart and dig her deeper. Rather than taking charge of the men around her and orchestrating Duncan’s demise because Macbeth can’t stomach it, ever frightened Roscille merely follows the orders of this overbearing and domineering version of Macbeth who has a thirst for blood and violence— complete character reversal from the story we know.

My other main disappointment was how disproportionate the story was in focusing on certain elements of the original story while glossing over or entirely skipping others. In Ava Reid’s version MacDuff is given only a few brief mentions by name only. His significant role in the original is almost completely removed when he’s mentioned once as that-traitor-MacDuff-in-his-castle-over-yonder, then again as having been killed on one of Macbeth’s most recent conquests. No actual action or interaction with MacDuff or his family is featured. On the other hand, the author spends a significant portion of the book developing a much more involved plot line for Banquo and especially Fleance. The author also gives significant spotlight to Duncan’s sons, whose names have changed from Malcolm and Donalbain to Lisander and Evander, including a particularly fantastical element that I’m still trying to reconcile whether I think it worked or was completely preposterous.

On a positive note, I did appreciate that the three witches, referred to by Roscille in her native French as “Les Lavandieres,” were given a back story in this retelling. They aren’t just there, but we find out how they came to be there and where their involvement with Macbeth stems from. In this aspect of the retelling I feel the author did justice to Shakespeare’s witches and expanding on their story.

Overall, I realized in the process of writing this review that I don’t even remember in specifics how the book ended. This version of Lady Macbeth is completely unmemorable for me. Still. While this is an honest review, it’s purpose isn’t to dissuade anyone from reading Ava Reid overall. She’s a fantastic writer of darker fantasy and Juniper & Thorn blew me away in 2023. I still look forward to future work from her.

A bit of a gothic feminine rage fever dream...

This was cruel and cold and violent from the very beginning. At some points, it was hard to look at in my current head space. The thing about me is that I actually don't know a lot of Shakespeare’s work past the required readings in high school, we might have went over Macbeth but I can't remember (this is true for me for a lot of retellings past those that are pretty mainstream), so I went into this blindfolded. I did struggle with trying to get a grasp on the language but if you just keep going it gets easier.

This story was dark, it's kind of a creeping violence that follows you from one page to the next and jumps out fully occasionally. I've only read ASID by Reid but I find Their writing to be very poetic and atmospheric. With both of these books there's a bit of a is that really happening or is this some kind of Shutter Island situation. I will say that if you're looking for that bit of dark whimsy that ASID had or even the romantic elements of it, you might not find that in this one but I do think fans of Reid's work will enjoy this!

I think we do a disservice to Roscille by having these expectations that she is a mastermind. She's a sheltered 17 year old girl, sent off to a very far away foreign land, her only friend and companion is taken from her and she is just trying to do anything to avoid the marriage bed and survive no matter the cost. She might think she knows what she's doing, but what 17 year old doesn't? What other choice does she have? I do wish we got a little bit more substance from Roscille but I'm not sure there was much room for it in this story with fear being such a driving force and her having very little time with anyone she might consider an ally. She was truly isolated and alone for most of this.

I will give it to Reid, They do not shy away from writing fully in a character's shoes. Of course, Roscille is going to think of the Scots as violent brutes, it's what she has been told. It's what she personally experiences on arrival. In fact, this characterization extends to most men in this story. I think as the reader we can contextualize that this was painted with a broad brush and leave it at that. This is a man's world and that is made very clear. The feminism was heavy-handed and a bit dramatic but I expected no less in this reimagining, there is so much feminine rage infused in these pages. I think fans of Slewfoot or any good for her, I support women's rights and women's wrongs stories might enjoy this.

There were a few things that felt a bit loosey-goosey and the ending was a bit more abrupt than I was expecting but overall I did enjoy my time with this and found it to be impactful.

PS. There's a dragon! and witches!

You know that feeling when good writing can pluck you out of space and time and into a carefully curated environment of the writers making? Or in this case, the wonderfully weird and eerie reimagining of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

All hail Ava Reid’s newest creation, Lady Macbeth.

“There is another world, spreading cold beneath the one she has always known. Dark water and darker words. Bloody auguries. The stones of civilization have been build upon raw, perverse madness.”

This book is magic and madness. It is a damp, cold undertow that pulls you in with poetic prose and deliciously dark, gothic atmosphere.

It took me a chapter or two to get into the writing style, but once I did I could not put this book down.
For my fellow lovers of female rage, of villainous protagonists and feminist remakes, I highly recommend this one.

4.5/5 stars

I sadly DNF’d this book at 16 %.

I was very excited upon being approved for this ARC a few months ago, as I thoroughly enjoyed A Study In Drowning and Ava Reid’s writing in it.

However, in recent months I have seen comments from more than one person I trust talking about the xenophobia and misogyny in the book. Wanting to form my own opinion, I tried to start the book with an open mind but it was quickly apparent what the other ARC reviewers were referencing. After reading a few in-depth reviews, it became clear that this was not the case of a flawed character that throughout the book realizes the issue with her views but something that’d be present throughout the book. I therefore made the decision to DNF as it made me uncomfortable to continue reading a book with this narrative.

Thank you to NetGalley and Del Rey for the eARC.

Thank you to NetGalley and Del Rey for the opportunity to read and review this book.

If you are familiar with Macbeth, you probably will not like this book. (me)
Lady Macbeth is an iconic character and (in my opinion) did not need a “feminist retelling”, or if she did, the changes to her character in this story did not serve that purpose. I usually enjoy Ava Reid’s prose and atmosphere, but almost every aspect of this story did not work for me. The constant repetition was annoying and boring, so I DNF’d at 40%.

I have read and will continue to read everything this author has ever written, but each of her books are so different, it's almost impossible to know what to expect. She always has gorgeous writing and complicated characters, and this was true for Lady Macbeth. It was definitely a dark, twisted, monstrous take on Shakepeare's Macbeth, with lots of Scottish lore thrown in the mix. The romance was a very small portion of it, and the monster part even less. I really enjoyed the idea of this story being told from a woman's perspective—realistically portraying the amount of power woman would have had and giving back story to the witches and everything. I guess there were parts where I would have liked a little more development, almost for it to be a little less married to the original story. But overall it was a compelling, beautifully told story.

A Study in Drowning was in my top 10 reads of the 2023, and I could not be more excited to be chosen as an ARC reader! Thank you Netgalley and Del Rey publishing!

In true Ava Reid fashion this was a beautifully dark and haunting story with *f*ck the patriarchy" vibes.

I'm not a big Shakespeare fan, so maybe I wasn't the right audience for this book. I enjoyed Ava's take on the story, but I struggled getting through the first part. I do think it got better once I got through the rough beginng. From there the pacing really picks up and sucks you in. So push through! I think if I were to go back and reread it, it would be even more impactful. Ava Reid's books are just so well-planned and constructed that I often miss interconnected moments.

I can't wait to see what Ava Reid writes next!

Thank you NetGalley and Del Rey for allowing me the opportunity to review this book as an ARC!
Lady Macbeth is a story created based loosely on the Shakespearian play Macbeth but told from the perspective of Macbeth’s wife, Roscille. Roscille is different. Her hair is white as snow and her skin is as pale to match. What is the most unique of all her features are her eyes. Roscille can drive men to madness by making eye contact with them. When this is discovered at a young age, she is forced to wear a veil at all times. At seventeen years old, Roscille is wed to Macbeth as a token of peace between her father and the Scottish man. Roscille must use her magic and her wit to keep her alive in this new home. What she isn’t aware of, however, is the prophecy spoken over Macbeth and the dangers it brings.

I enjoyed this book immensely!! Reid’s writing is beautifully done. The story flows like water from one plot point to the next. I loved Shakespeare in high school so to see a retelling that’s not Romeo and Juliet is always a win in my book. Reid does an amazing job in character and world building. The book was immersive and I genuinely felt like I was a spectator rather than a reader. If you love a strong FMC and Shakespeare like me, this would be a great book to pick up!

This book is, in fact, my first introduction to the story of Lady Macbeth. I've never read the original source material; what most intrigued me into wanting to read this book was simply my love for and unending quest of gothic literature. However, this book has definitely piqued my interest in revisiting this story and character. I love a woman unafraid to do what it takes to protect herself and get what she wants and this book gives you than x100. I am so grateful to be able to read this before its release, thank you!!!

I read A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid and thought it was okay. Interesting enough that I was intrigued by this book, especially the stunning cover.

Unfortunately, I was incredibly bored while reading. I found the scheming to be annoying, the way certain people are portrayed to be a bit offensive, and just overall not what I was expecting this book to read like.

I feel like if you’re a huge fan of this authors work, you’ll probably like this too.