A young girl squirms and hunches, hoping her father will stop gazing at her growing breasts. A wife tightens her arms around her abdomen to protect her unborn baby from the blows of her drunken husband. Is suffering the fate of women? Is their lot simply to endure with equanimity? This is a book where feminist instincts and emotions are at their strongest, shocking the reader by prefacing each sad story with an excerpt from an ancient myth or legend in which woman is glorified and deified: the contrast between the idealized woman of mythology and the battered woman of reality is surely obscene. It's a woman's book of superlatives, but only of the superlatives of suffering and endurance.
Used availability for Catherine Lim's The Woman's Book of Superlatives