Synopsis
Good girls deserve a treat . . .
The House is the most exclusive sorority on campus, and all its alumni are beautiful, high-achieving and respected. After a freshman year she would rather forget, sophomore Nina Kaur knows being accepted into The House is the first step to the brightest possible future. The House will surely ease her fears of failure and protect her from those who see a young woman on her own as prey. Meanwhile, adjunct professor Dr Sloane Hartley is struggling. After eighteen months at home with her newborn daughter, Sloane’s clothes don’t fit right; her girl-dad husband isn’t as present as he thinks he is; and even the few hours a day she’s apart from her child fill her psyche with paralyzing ennui. When invited to be The House’s academic liaison, Sloane enviously drinks in a level of collective perfection that Sloane desperately craves.
As Nina and Sloane each get drawn deeper into the arcane rituals of the sisterhood, they learn that living well comes with bloody costs. And when they are finally invited to the table, they will have to decide just how much they can stomach in the name of solidarity and power.
Review
Deliciously depraved.
I didn’t even know what genre this was when I picked it up. I once said I’d read Olivie Blake’s shopping list and honestly with a title like ‘Girl Dinner’, this might have just been that.
It wasn’t. It is a biting literary fiction, a satire looking at womanhood and the performance of being a girl, mother, subject.
Sloane is a new mother to a demanding baby daughter. Her body has changed, her husband seems to be less encompassed by an all devouring love for their daughter, and she is trying to write another academic book that centre women in a department headed by white men.
Our other perspective is Nina, a sophomore, who is salivating to join THE sorority. Being a member of The House was not only to be gifted access to the launching pad for eternal success, it was to be preselected for it.
The physical shape-shifting only camouflaged a love that was more like insanity, contortions of the body to cage the madness inside. A love that defied reason and felt closer to pain. It would never be reciprocated—impossible, who had ever loved their parent as they loved their child? Who could ever reasonably ask for that kind of love in return?
This is a darkly humorous satire on what it means to be A Good Mother, to Belong. Every character is aware of the performance of womanhood and wants to rebel against it, but is aware they need to fit in to reach higher.
This was a hot mess. In a brilliant way.
You will either love or bounce off the writing style. Low-key stream of conscious, often uncomfortable and probing.
For example:
But even if she didn’t, Max was basically a lock for tenure—provided that he didn’t, like, accidentally piss off someone at a dinner party or something!—not that he would—it was pretty easy to forgive him basically anything—so the point was Sloane didn’t have to worry about losing health insurance or whether they could afford their absolutely ludicrous mortgage, even though for some reason (?) she absolutely did.
Is Olivie Blake inserting herself into this narrative? Are we as readers seeing ourselves in these words? Are we all secretly going to start what may potentially be a cult?
I ate it up and left no crumbs. I would recommend this book (particularly to women). Even if you haven’t enjoyed her other books, with each book, she offers something completely new.
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