Synopsis:
Success is an acquired taste . . .
From the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller Olivie Blake, this is a powerful and darkly fun novel about ambition, lust and eating your fill – as wealthy mums and sorority girls practice a sinister new wellness trend.
Being accepted into The House would be Nina Kaur’s first step into a bright and shining future. The most exclusive sorority on campus, its members are beautiful, high-achieving and respected. Nina craves this security. Adjunct professor Dr Sloane Hartley is struggling with new motherhood and a return to work. Her clothes don’t fit right, her husband isn’t as present as he thinks and her dissatisfaction is increasingly paralyzing. When Sloane is invited to join The House as their faculty advisor, she drinks in the collective perfection on display.
Nina and Sloane are drawn ever deeper into the sisterhood’s arcane rituals. But living well comes with bloody costs. And how much can they really afford to pay?
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 that is 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?
If you enjoyed Yellowface by Rf Kuang, you will find something in this.
Whilst this wasn’t a favourite from the author for me, I ate it up and left no crumbs. Basically, yes I would recommend this. Even if you haven’t enjoyed her other books, every book she offers something completely new.
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