Girl Dinner by Olivie Blake

TL;DR: I’m not sure that this went as far as it could have.
Source: Netgalley – Thank you so much to the publisher!

Plot: A young woman joins a sorority with secrets while a professor is caught in the mix.
Characters: Absolutely no one here is a good person. It’s interesting, I’ll give it that.
Setting: The setting was probably the weakest part of this. That is especially sad considering the idea of the ‘The House’.
Satire/Horror: It could have been darker and I think it would have had more impact.

Summary:

Good girls deserve a treat.

Every member of The House, the most exclusive sorority on campus, and all its alumni, are beautiful, high-achieving, and universally respected.

After a freshman year she would rather forget, sophomore Nina Kaur knows being one of the chosen few accepted into The House is the first step in her path to the brightest possible future. Once she’s taken into their fold, the House will surely ease her fears of failure and protect her from those who see a young woman on her own as easy prey.

Meanwhile, adjunct professor Dr. Sloane Hartley is struggling to return to work after accepting a demotion to support her partner’s new position at the cutthroat University. After 18 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 the way the alumnae seem to have it all, achieving a level of collective perfection that Sloane so 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.

Thoughts:

Perhaps satire isn’t for me, or perhaps I like it a bit more intense than this but Girl Dinner didn’t quote satiate me like I hoped it would. A critique of the societal expectations of women, girls, moms, etc was what I was expecting. Instead it felt as if we were sunk into the psyche of two women who were drowning, a feeling I know but don’t want to read about.

Ultimately for me this book lacked the absurdity or truly off the wall ending you’d want to gain catharsis from. We spend the entire book following Nina, naïve and excited who is facing the world and The House. We also follow Sloane who honestly just read as a depressed woman struggling in a bad marriage. The two of them are each in their own way grappling with ‘womanhood’ and I would argue ‘personhood’.

The build and tension in the book culminated in a fairly lackluster peak with little to none of the biting satire I expected. While I didn’t hate the story I found myself more annoyed than anything and relishing the tiny crumbs of horror we got.

This one was a bit underwhelming, and for my first Olivie Blake it was fairly disappointing. I’ll continue trying her work as I know she dabbles in different genres and styles but this wasn’t it for me.