Another day another badly-written book about a feminist female protagonist who doesn’t want a relationship with a man or any children, yet is a complete total mess and has nothing interesting going on in her life.
Empowering? No. And I really wished these authors (usually female) would stop writing such awful (usually female) characters. I don’t know a single woman feminist or not who behaves or strives to behave like the women described in these pages (this and Melissa Broder’s The Pisces).
Oliver was so badly written and editted that I was surprised to learn Gannon is a journalist. She actually had written non-fiction books before and I quite enjoy her podcast. But this book was awful.
Let’s start with the main character here.
Olive is awful
Olive is child-free by choice – which the author and Olive herself never ceases to tell you over and over again. She even rudely yells it in the middle of a gathering for women who want to have kids (why is she even there?!). Yet by the end of the book, she ends up an ambivalent stepmum/mum to her boyfriend’s kids from a previous marriage. Eyeroll.
She’s a complete mess and is always drinking or drunk or hungover. She is yet another irresponsible individual who can’t seem to get to work on time or focus on work, and has to hide in the toilet to cry about some dude. Yet she gets a promotion to editor-in-chief.
She has a friendship with 3 other women, none of whom she likes, and I’m feeling like none of them like her or each other too. They are all busy with their own lives and kids and have drifted apart – cool that happens. Yet Olive somehow seems bothered by their life choices.
Their friendship circle was actually quite painful to read about as it was very obvious these women no longer have much in common with each other compared to when they were in college.
The drab writing style
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a huge fan of authors who use the inner-dialogue/diary type of style. It ends up so rambly and half the time these inner thoughts of these characters are so inane, meaningless and uninteresting. It makes it very hard to
I’m also side-eyeing the editor for this book. There were lots of dialogue that were missing punctuation, weird grammar etc with really childish dialogue.
Dialogue is supposed to add to the reader’s understanding of the character, not take away from it and not confuse the readers further.
But there was nothing about the dialogue here that was interesting or entertaining or funny or insightful.
Overall rating: 0.5/5 stars
Book wasn’t for me and a couple of hours of my life I’d never get back!