"A clever, cruel, and very funny book" – Mirian Gondelberg Who said only men know how to be scoundrels? After her first foray as a playwright—with the play "Os defamantes"—and co-authoring the books "Eu e você, você e eu" and "Mulheres no Ataque," Rio de Janeiro journalist Martha Mendonça, in her first solo book, tackles a very particular universe: female scoundrelism. In "SCOUNDREL, FEMININE NOUN," Martha subverts the gender cliché that always places men and women in the same roles, showing that women, when they want to, know exactly how to be scoundrels. Scoundrelism is not a male privilege. In six fictional accounts, the controversial anti-heroines Larissa, Cristina, Ângela, Diana, Ingrid, and Mariana—from different generations and in different contexts, but united by the same uncontrollable and terrible inclination—recount, in the first person, where their amoral natures have led them. They are not angry, and they do not seek revenge. They're not the ex-wife who alienates children from their parents or the ex-girlfriend who scratches a guy's car when she gets dumped. They just can't help but be... scoundrels. They act for pleasure, out of a need to manipulate and get ahead. Some parts of the stories are based on true stories, but most come from the author's fertile imagination or from feelings she's experienced or witnessed in her friends. The desire to cheat on the perfect man, sleep with a sly friend's husband, live off a fool, or kill a jerk. After all, for her, deep down—and not so deep down—every woman has a scoundrel (to a greater or lesser extent) inside her. It's up to each woman to allow it to manifest itself or simply keep it all in the realm of imagination. As anthropologist Mirian Goldenberg, who wrote the book's blurb, aptly describes it, "CANALHA, FEMININE NOUN is a book to make you think, to distrust, to generate curiosity, to provoke. A book to make you laugh a lot and also cry a little. Especially for the man who has suffered at the hands of a delightful scoundrel."
