What exactly am I supposed to make of this book? Having recently read Virginie Despentes' brilliant [b:Apocalypse Baby|18125141|Apocalypse Baby|Virginie Despentes|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387750279s/18125141.jpg|13816195], you'd think I'd be better prepared for this one. But, I don't know. Am I supposed to sympathize with these characters? I don't, or at least, not quite. There's a lot of justifiable rage in these women, but also quite a lot of non-justifiable rage. (Nadine commits her first murder mostly because she's worried about her friend having also committed murder and she kind of wants to bond with him, sort of?)

Apocalypse Baby did this amazing thing where it put the reader into the heads of so many different POVs, it really inverted the detective noir tropes, creating a broad range of sympathetic characters. Baise-Moi sits us squarely into Maru and Nadine, and at times I wasn't sure what the book itself wanted us to think of them. I couldn't tell if this was an inversion of sexploitation tropes or just a different version of them (honestly, I'm not an expert on that particular genre).

None of this is intended as a negative critique of the book. This blended and confusing line of guilt and eroticism and violence and culpability and empathy is what makes it such a powerful novel.