The way this finishes unfinished leaves it echoing in my head in a very positive way. I am likely to keep turning it over for some time. I agree with the critics who rave about how the combination of deep ethnography and great writing yields powerful portraits of the titular women. As a man, I think all I can do is look from my distant vantage and try to see and hear what Taddeo presents. I can't get much closer to it than that - I don't particularly understand these ladies' desires, but my understanding is not the point, as I take it. The point is to acknowledge them, to bear witness to them, to maybe gain some insight into how male desire (pathological here) alchemized with these ladies' own lives, personalities, experiences, circumstances into female desire (with attendant pathologies).

Asking about true agency and responsibility may be beside the point. On the one hand, I want these ladies to be able to own their own desires. On the other hand, all three of them bear the male imprint, and, again, in all three cases it is inherently pathological, not least because it marks them before they hold full (adult) agency.

I might upgrade this to 5 stars at some point, because even sitting down to type this I am uncovering additional layers. Anyway, highly recommended.