Girl Dinner by Olivie Blake

Book Review

Melody Bowles

‘Girl Dinner’ is internet shorthand for a simple meal thrown together quickly. ‘Girl’ has been prefixed to a few other words as well, usually meaning making something so easy it’s almost stupid. I know it’s meant to be funny, but it makes my inner feminist pout. Being a girl comes with a million invisible social rules to navigate and the expectation that you will forever be a people pleaser. Olivie Blake’s book seems to agree with me. It’s razor sharp in its observations about how the world treats girls and women and the sky-high expectations everyone has of them. Parents, husbands, children, fellow girlfriends. Even themselves.

British universities lack the ‘sororities’ and ‘fraternities’ prevalent in their US counterparts. I’ve absorbed enough knowledge from American media to be able to follow, but it’s worth noting some terms will likely be unfamiliar to a British audience.

We follow two points of view. Sloane is mother of an eighteen-month-old and completely besotted with her baby. The world says it’s time for her to go back to work, but leaving baby Isla in daycare or even with her father hurts Sloane to the core. Luckily, she soon meets the high-flying Alex, who offers Sloane the chance to be an academic adviser to an exclusive sorority known mostly as ‘The House’.

Nina is an ambitious sophomore student who intends to become a member of The House. She has to ingratiate herself with its members and follow a rigorous application process. But if she’s successful, her life path seems assured. Members of The House go on to become beautiful, rich and revered by the world around them.

The secret of The House? Cannibalism, of course. Is it really a spoiler when the title barely hides it? But the question of who is getting eaten and why is left lingering as the story moves deeper into the politics of The House. The book offers the blackest of black humour, delivering some real zingers -” A good woman was just a good loser, because there was no way to win” and “I can’t be expected to girlboss under these conditions!” The culture wars elements draw heavily from internet culture (‘VidStar’ stands in for TikTok) and a lot of the humour and terminology feels extremely online. I didn’t mind this, but it can be a little odd to see words like ‘doomscrolling’ written in print.

Read Girl Dinner if you’d like dark social satire with no heroines to be seen and an utterly wicked sense of humour.