Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell [Kindle Edition]

I highly recommend this book.. it's a secret treasure and felt like it was written especially for me.

It's the kind of book that you want to give to your closest friends as a gift, as it provides an original, unpretentious insight into how we shape our desire and how we respond and take on the desire of others, which is projected onto us.. for love, sex, annihilation, acceptance, social conformity.

This is not an anti-men or patriarchal society type essay, which is refreshing and which makes this a contemporary piece of work for the modern, post-human woman. Men are wonderful, sensuous beings, and we no longer need to reinforce our feminine power by diminishing their masculinity.

This book is as much about women's desires, as it is about men's.. as both are so interlinked and reinforce each other. As women, we are conditioned to reinforce men's masculinity, to nurture it, because they need that and in exchange, they are supposed to bring safety. Comfort.. this book subtly deconstructs this perspective through carefully chosen anecdotes from Sontag and Woolf, coupled with Angel's reflections and life story.

Angel argues that we live out our desires like a man in drag... an interesting analogy - one that you instantly get.

Her intimate reflections on her lovers are moving, erotic and pure. Her take on pornography is an interesting one.

At times, the book reads like an Emily Dickinson poem - so pious with her words, so economical... which makes her statements impactful... a cause and pause for reflection facilitated by the book's spaciousness.. The blank pages allow the reader to weave their reflections into the essay, as we all have a story to tell, it's an inclusive piece of work.. by the end, you are left with a rich tapestry of words from which to draw comfort and reassurance.

Katherine Angel's Unmastered kind of blows the format of a book apart. There are no named characters, only the protagonist 'I' (the entire book is written in female first-person) and 'Him' (her lover) and only a couple of other characters referred to briefly. It reads as a collection of thoughts throughout the evolution of a relationship, the giddy-love, the intense passion, the love-making, the doubts, the fears and ultimately a tragedy that leaves the protagonist re-assessing all of those feelings earlier stated in the book.

I found this an interesting read, the expletive-filled pages are shocking when a page on has "F me, oh yes, F me" written on an entire leaf. Separated by a blank leaf, then a single roman numeral on the next page, then another page of a handful of lines. Frequently there are less than 20 words per leaf. Consequently, if the story grips you (initially it's not all that clear that it's a story at all) you will speed through the 336 pages in less than an hour.

Whilst its format of the collection of thoughts is novel and intriguing, it's nothing new and I did not feel that the book lived up to the blurb whatsoever; "allowing us to think afresh about desire" - it wasn't eye-opening or educating at all, merely a collection of statements, some shocking, some touching, others random and derivative. Might raise an eyebrow in the raunchier parts, but ultimately, it's all been done before.

I am not sure quite what I was expecting when I ordered this book, but I was startled by my reactions when I started reading. In prose, sometimes only three words to a page, it seemed haphazard at first, oddly formatted, but start reading and it draws you in, leaves you nodding in places, teary eyed in others. For me, personally, this book to spoke to the very depths of me, made me smile in places, cry in others. Buy it, allocate an afternoon to curl up and just read it, and let it sink into your bones. I'm pretty sure you'll be glad you did.

Hard to describe exactly what the book is about as it covers so many areas, all interconnected. Love, sex, desire, need, control, trust, grief, change. So many subjects, and I suppose the bottom line is that it speaks of the need to allow inner fire to be what it needs to be, to let it flame and go where it needs to, instead of shutting it up in a box and clipping your own wings by extension.

Beautiful, poignant, pointed, almost like a scalpel opening an old abscess and letting it heal properly for the first time. I can't recommend this book highly enough.