Ava Reid reimagines Macbeth with a compelling twist of fantasy and powerful feminist themes. In this retelling, Roscille's father arranges her marriage to Macbeth. Rocille is a foreign noblewoman rumored to be a witch who is forced to wear a veil to prevent her from bewitching the men around her. Intrigued by her magical abilities, Macbeth takes a particular interest in her. Despite being forced to appear docile and quiet, Roscille must navigate the treacherous game of power struggles to secure her position and assert her power to survive.

Ava Reid is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. If I were to recommend one book I read this year, it would be Lady Macbeth. Everyone should read this book. Think you know the Scottish play? Think again.

I'm a little bit torn about this one. I've read Ava Reid before and really enjoyed her work, but this one didn't hook me the way I expected it to.

Part of me is a little wary of books tagged as feminist retellings of classic stories as I kind of feel like they've all let me down so far. And while I really loved the mood of this novel, Roscille's character fell really flat for me.

For the first half of the book I was constantly wondering if her supposed power over men was even real, or if it was a product of men blaming their selfishness and impulsivity on women. But it was real and severely under used. A lot of Roscille's inner monologue felt like it was all about how cunning and smart she was, but how she was raised to hide it for fear of retaliation. But really, there's only one scheme in this book that felt wholehearted on her part. Everything else felt like a cowardly reaction to the behavior of the men around her.

As a lot of the other reviews mentioned, it really felt like Roscille's agency was stripped from her. That she was more of a reactionary figure than someone trying to create advantageous situations for herself.

DNF - 10%
I can tell right off the bat that this book is not for me and, also because of the opinions of some trusted friends, I don't think it is worth me continuing.

I'm a huge fan of Ava Reid, so there is some bias here. However, I think Lady Macbeth is her best and most mature novel to date.

Atmospheric, complex, and at times hard to swallow, Ava Reid once again blends folk horror with body horror in a dark origin story of one of Shakespeare's most notorious women. Lady Macbeth reads like a ghost story, reminiscent of Hamlet's own haunting decades later. The novel forces us to face what many women experience (and continue to experience) daily, and the choices made when desperation and survival are all that drive you.

With enough of a unique spin on who and what Lady Macbeth was to make this retelling fresh and relevant, Ava Reid once again makes monsters out of women...and I can't bring myself to be mad about it.

Everything Ava Reid writes is a masterpiece. Jaw dropped. Couldn't put it down. Need the finished copy in my hands immediately!!!

“You will haunt me too,” she says at last. “We can never be truly apart then; if we are each other’s ghost.”
I am not overly familiar with Macbeth and therefore I wasn’t sure what to expect from this story. From the little I did know, I had gathered that Lady Macbeth was manipulative and maybe even evil, but I love the voice that Ava Reid gave her in this story.
Roscille is incredibly clever and cunning. She has to be in order to survive in a man’s world, being sold and used for other’s gain and agendas. The manipulation she uses on others isn’t for evil means, but to survive and avoid some of her biggest fears, some of which still end up coming true.
I think people were expecting her to be a villainess in this story, but this paints a much more realistic picture, in my opinion, of what her motives would’ve been for what happened in Macbeth. In her shoes I can’t say I wouldn’t have done the same or at least tried, all in the name of surviving.
There were times where I completely forgot this was a fantasy book and therefore would feel jarring when it came up. The dragon for instance came out of left field even though we knew and it was hinted that something was going on there.
Additionally, the romance could’ve really benefited from a few more interactions throughout the story. There was definitely tension and beautiful moments there but I was left wanting more when it came to how we got there in the end.
The dark and atmospheric prose mixed with this haunting yet hopeful story gripped me from start to finish. I definitely fell in love with Ava Reid’s writing and while it isn’t perfect, I had a great time reading this!

I love how dark this one was! It's definitely a bit of a departure for the author, but I'm a big fan of unlikable women, so this one really spoke to me. I'll admit there were times Roscille made me want to tear my hair out, but overall I really enjoyed the book. I'm not sure this book is a slam dunk for the author's previous readership, but in my opinion, it can more than stand on its own.

Well, the writing is beautiful. And I may have enjoyed this had it not been a MacBeth retelling. But this iteration of the classic play completely removes Lady Macbeth’s agency, strips her of her power over MacBeth and leaves a shivering mess of a woman. There are moments of brilliance that are overshadowed by the nonsensical character and plot changes.

A dark, tragic, and haunting reimagining of Shakespeare’s most famous villainess.

“Lady Macbeth” follows Roscille after she is wed to a Scottish brute, who does not leave his warrior ways behind when he comes to the marriage bed. To survive his hostility and dangerous court, she relies on her wiles and hidden witchcraft.

I am quite the Shakespeare fanatic and “The Tragedy of Macbeth” is one of my favorite plays precisely because of how cunning and ruthless Lady Macbeth’s character is. I gravitated toward this novel because I was curious about Reid’s take on the character and though this is not the play retold from her point-of-view, I enjoyed it for what it is! Reid’s reimagining gives Lady Macbeth her own name, a past, and occult power that cleverly expands on Shakespeare’s original work. In Reid’s rendition, she captures a woman living in a patriarchal society who has her voice violently taken away by the men around her. Roscille’s fear surrounding abuse at the hand of men is what fuels her scheming and manipulation—what ultimately turns her into Lady Macbeth. She doesn’t want a crown, she wants to survive. She uses her beauty as a weapon in retaliation against those holding her womanhood against her. She finds power in her rage, which she acts on only after it has festered. I think that is the key difference between Roscille and Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth—in a world that does not favor women, she is less ambitious and more reactive in a sense. This new portrayal took some getting used to, but once I did, I appreciated how it widened my perspective.

I was entranced by Reid’s atmospheric and lyrical writing. The intention and power behind each and every word adds depth to Roscille’s character, showing the extent of her wiles and smarts. The bits of proverbial wisdom Reid sprinkles throughout allow her to emulate the bard himself in her own way. What I love most is how Reid uses various names for each character to reflect the different languages being spoken at the time.

➾ NOTE: After careful reflection and reading reviews written by my peers, it has been pointed out that this book can be interpreted as xenophobic. Intentional or not, most, if not all, of the Scottish characters—an ethnic group that Roscille does not belong to—are underdeveloped and described as brutish, violent, and evil. This characterization is unfair and in no way pays homage to the source material.

Beautiful writing, I just don’t think I was able to connect all that well. Took me a little long to get through. Confusing at points and dragged on at times- not sure if I needed a Macbeth refresher beforehand but felt like I should’ve brushed up. Nothing against the writer- I’ll definitely be picking up another- this Macbeth retelling just wasn’t for me. Thank you to Netgalley and Ava Reid and her team for allowing me this early viewing.

Many thanks to Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine/Del Rey, author Ava Reid, and NetGalley for providing me the eARC in exchange for my honest review.
Publication Date: August 13, 2024

2.5 STARS

Lady MacBeth was a major miss for me—both in plot direction and writing mechanics/execution.

The mood is stark. I wasn’t engaged emotionally. The world building is minimal and scene-setting lacking in imagery. I could not picture much as I was reading.

The magic in this world could have been interesting but only comes into play when servicing the broader themes.

Pacing feels glacial. Not much happens over the first half of the book. What events do occur are belabored by our protagonist Roscille’s musings and insecurities, unfortunately, with lots of repetition. All this filler dulled the impact of significant plot beats. The flowery prose even further hindered my engagement.

Add to this the impersonal narrative style. (I don’t mind 3rd person.) The greatest problem was the lack of dimension and nuance given the main characters. We get a young bride with little agency forced by her father into marrying a much older husband with blood on his hands and machinations on his mind. I don’t feel like either of the Macbeths get much of a character arc.

In school, I found myself enthralled by Shakespeare’s Macbeth and its characters. The subtext of the Scottish play creates a litany of questions in the reader/watcher’s head as to who MacBeth and his lady wife truly are inside and what brought them together in their shared bloody quest for power. This book kills any sociological mystery by ramming blunt answers down your throat.

What’s more, I don’t think the provided answers ring true for who the characters end up becoming. This ingenue who feels powerless does not match up with the antiheroine baddie in the original Shakespeare play. Reid liberally changed the story so that the greatest evil could be shifted onto male characters—namely Macbeth—and provided Lady Macbeth a sympathetic backstory. I’m all for retellings, but this is a rewrite.

Reid does competently write on a sentence-to-sentence level. You may like this book if (a) you’re a huge fan of the recent trend of feminist retellings in Greek mythology, or (b) you can consume Lady Macbeth independently of the original play or are completely unfamiliar with the source material.

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.