Award-winning writer, teacher
and scholar

Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience

Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience

Cover Art by Lauren Rinaldi

Finalist for the 2013 Backwaters Prize
Nominee for the Elgin Award, 2015 & 2016

In this campy, contemporary retelling of the Bluebeard myth, Laura Madeline Wiseman charts the love of three sisters who each marry the same man upon the demise of the sister who preceded her. Bluebeard is usually framed as a story of blood and gore, but Wiseman focuses on the love each of his unfortunate wives felt, the first blush of romance and young marriage, the complicated turns of mature desire and the past we bring into our present affections.

While it is true that Laura Madeline Wiseman’s stunning exposé of uxoricide and myth, Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience (2014), recounts the Bluebeard Myth, the book is no simple retelling of one man’s compulsive brutality upon the second sex. Three sisters are given the chance to show us their lives, and through the process, teach us about love. In narratives that entice me to lose myself, Wiseman explores intimacy and fatality as symbiotic philosophies that divulge the role of the battered wife’s body—its possession, its duplicity, and ultimately, its reclamation. –  New South Journal

Praise for Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience

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