[B]risk, readable … Brennan circles around the shoes from all angles, and her brief chapters add up to a kaleidoscopic view of feminine public existence, both wide-ranging and thoughtful.
Jezebel
High Heel is poetry in prose, and while a serious work about the shoe in worldwide history and contemporary culture, it sounds more rhythmic, like poetry in motion. ... Read more
San Francisco Book Review
In High Heel, the wonderful Summer Brennan embraces a slippery, electric conundrum: Does the high heel stand for oppression or power? … In 150 little essays, Brennan goes at it with poetry, literary references, myth, the psychopathology of rape, fairy tales, politics, and fashion history. All is brought off so beautifully that you can’t help reading … High Heel elevates us, keeps us off balance, and sharpens the point.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Myths about the transformative power of high heels are central to Summer Brennan’s latest book, High Heel. Part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, the book traces the history and cultural associations of high heels, primarily as worn by women. Drawing from Ovid’s tales to Cinderella to witch trials to modern courtrooms, Brennan makes the case that high heels are an apt metaphor for the ways in which women have been hobbled in their mobility. She also tackles the relationship between beauty and suffering, highlighting the fraught nature of reclaiming objects defined under patriarchy for feminism.
Paste
The lovely cadences stack up like so many sand castles that sift iconic examples of high heels into a finely grained pile of pros and cons that each reader will sift through quite differently … Whether you're for them or against them, the radical uncertainty of Brennan's take on high heels is worth reflection. High Heel is a properly modern consideration of what is at stake and it uses thoroughly intriguing methods of inquiry to approach a well-balanced lack of resolution.
PopMatters
From Cinderella’s glass slippers to Carrie Bradshaw’s Manolo Blahniks, Summer Brennan deftly analyzes one of the world’s most provocative and sexualized fashion accessories in High Heel, part of the Object Lessons series from Bloomsbury. Told in 150 vignettes that alternately entertain and educate, disturb and depress, the book ruminates on the ways in which society fetishizes, celebrates, and demonizes the high heel as well as the people, primarily women, who wear them … Whether you see high heels as empowering or a submission to patriarchal gender roles (or land somewhere in between), you’ll likely never look at a pair the same way again after reading High Heel.
Longreads
High Heel is thought-provoking meditation on what it means to move through the world as a woman. Brennan’s book, written in very small sections, is short, but powerful enough to completely change your world view.
Refinery29
High Heel is a riveting, ferociously intelligent, deeply liberating book. I would like to press a copy of it into the hands of every woman I know—and every man, too.
Jami Attenberg, author of All Grown Up (2017) In the ongoing book series Object Lessons, about the hidden lives of ordinary things, [Brennan] steps into the shoe as a starting point to consider the politics of femininity and of being a woman in public – from the trouble with fairy tales to Sylvia Plath’s black patent pumps.
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
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