Katie Buckley’s assured debut novel examines female agency and how women are shaped and controlled by myths and the expectations of a patriarchal society. Hero is a waitress and aspiring writer. She lives with her chef boyfriend in a studio flat and he’s asked her to marry him. He’s a good man, they love each other, but she can’t commit. He packs his bag and tells her she has a week to decide.
Hero informs us she’s smart, attractive and has slept with 108 men. Over the course of seven days, she revisits her past, ponders why she doesn’t want to be anyone’s wife and explains the reasons for her hesitancy. In particular, the men – past boyfriends or authority figures – who have abused or failed her. She recalls an inappropriate conversation with a teaching assistant, aged nine, and being indecently propositioned at work by her boss. An earlier relationship with an older artist dented her confidence – she could “never question him, never show want or need”.
Hero also interrogates various myths and fairytales and questions why women frequently have supporting roles: there to be objectified, discarded or to die. These include Cassandra, Helen of Troy and the sirens as well as selkies, witches and mermaids. She wonders why happy “love stories end when people get together … I want to know what happens to them”.
Buckley pulls no punches while challenging the limits imposed upon women by these archetypes, and her anger is palpable, but her sombre reflections on misogyny are punctuated with playful vignettes. Hero and her girlfriends reinvent themselves as heroines: “bandits in the wild west” known as the “mustang maidens” with nicknames such as “Rio Bravo” and “Two Shot”. As they knock back whisky and debate the “madonna/whore complex”, they question why they can’t be both.
Interwoven through the feminist meditations are Hero’s thoughts about her current relationship, which she directs to her boyfriend using the second-person voice. Loosely plotted, Hero is a fearless interrogation of female desire, anger and loneliness.
• Hero by Katie Buckley is published by Tinder Press (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
