A review by keepreadingbooks
Supper Club by Lara Williams

challenging dark emotional hopeful tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

The endorsements on the cover of Supper Club call it joyful, celebratory and funny (besides dark, carnal, feral and indulgent), and I have to say that, to me, that felt slightly misleading. I’ll give it celebratory, but I rarely found it joyful or funny. The main character, Roberta, and her friend Stevie create the Supper Club – a food club for women to eat with abandon and indulge themselves, to take up the space that is denied them in society, both metaphorically and physically. And you would think, “how great that they do this!”, except it never really feels like Roberta actually does celebrate herself or allow herself to take up that space she’s trying to occupy. Her motivation to start the Supper Club stems from a traumatic assault during her university years, and as such, her inability to become the woman she wishes to become is unequivocally linked to her unwillingness to deal with that trauma. She still keeps second-guessing, overthinking, pleasing (particularly men) in every aspect of her life, and it’s often painful to witness. When development finally happens and actual joy finds its way through the cracks, the book is practically over. 

Not that any of this made it a bad book, it just made it a different book; a book that I shifted between relating very much to and being rather frustrated by. Sometimes Lara Williams hit the nail right on the head, describing something that I had never thought to describe, and I immediately thought “that’s it! That’s what I feel/experience too!” Other times, I had trouble understanding the character’s choices and motivations. Generally, though, it was a well-written, impactful book that somehow read quickly even when nothing much happened. It might not be joyful or funny, but it’s undeniably a feminist book, a book to make you mad, and to make you want to take up space too. 

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