Scan barcode
A review by camreading
Supper Club by Lara Williams
4.0
If you enjoyed the quintessential white-girl-with-mental-health-issues vibe of My Year of Rest and Relaxation but are looking for something that's not quite as god damned depressing, this is your read. I teetered back and forth between rating this a 3 or a 4 (ideally would rate 3.5) but in all honesty, I had a great time reading it. I finished it within three days, felt drawn to it on my breaks at work and was excited to read more when I woke up in the morning. Williams uses the protagonist to address feelings of social anxiety, not having a place in the world, aimlessness, lack of ambition/goals and more in a way that I feel could resonate with many. Roberta's interactions with each character serve to showcase different parts of herself, and I liked that the author didn't always have to say outright what Roberta was feeling after an interaction or dialogue, as it felt like partway through the book we knew the character well enough to infer what she felt. The relationship between Stevie and Roberta as this all-encompassing, larger-than-life, inherently-romantic-but-simply-platonic ordeal is something I think many queer people can understand (i.e. borrowing the trope of that one friend you were really oddly close with in middle/high school or college before realizing you were queer) and I wish it had been explored more, especially at the end.
When reading realistic fiction, I find myself always asking of the characters, "why don't they just communicate with each other!?" which this book is no exception to, but the miscommunications between Roberta and Stevie, Adnan, Arnold, etc. did feel understandable to me. I say that loosely as the entire time Adnan expressed his disapproval for supper club / Stevie as a friend I just thought "did I accidentally skip a page? do I need to go back and reread something?" as I felt there was so little background for WHY he felt that way, WHY it bothered him so damn much. This part of the ending was also unsatisfactory for me, not knowing the result of Adnan and Roberta's falling-out, but I'll allow that it sort of makes sense as a plot device for the ending, allowing the reader to conjure multiple possibilities of what we think may have happened.
At times, this book felt like talking to a friend. I think Williams did well with the time sequencing - switching between Roberta's present life and her college years was easy to follow for me, which not all authors achieve with that type of flip-flop setting. I wasn't as impressed with the food narratives and recipe descriptions that often introduced the chapter, though I understood what the author was trying to do with them. Unfortunately to me they felt a bit on the nose, or unnecessary to just say whatever was trying to be said.
I enjoyed how this book equally saw Roberta's struggles for romance and for friendship/companionship, and how it implied throughout that both are worthy if not equal pursuits. If you've struggled making friends as an adult, it's uplifting to see how Roberta does so too for near a decade of adulthood before finding herself surrounded by several lovely, unique women in a way that she couldn't have expected. I've read other reviews that talk about how it's hard for them to sympathize with Roberta's search for friendship when she frequently turns down offers from her flatmates to socialize and generally refuses to help herself - and while that frustrates me too, I think it's indicative of that feeling where you'd prefer not to try so that you aren't stung by failure rather than seize those opportunities for potential friendship only to still end up alone. Even with Supper Club's issues (as some other reviews have mentioned), I would still venture to read another Lara Williams book in the future.
When reading realistic fiction, I find myself always asking of the characters, "why don't they just communicate with each other!?" which this book is no exception to, but the miscommunications between Roberta and Stevie, Adnan, Arnold, etc. did feel understandable to me. I say that loosely as the entire time Adnan expressed his disapproval for supper club / Stevie as a friend I just thought "did I accidentally skip a page? do I need to go back and reread something?" as I felt there was so little background for WHY he felt that way, WHY it bothered him so damn much. This part of the ending was also unsatisfactory for me, not knowing the result of Adnan and Roberta's falling-out, but I'll allow that it sort of makes sense as a plot device for the ending, allowing the reader to conjure multiple possibilities of what we think may have happened.
At times, this book felt like talking to a friend. I think Williams did well with the time sequencing - switching between Roberta's present life and her college years was easy to follow for me, which not all authors achieve with that type of flip-flop setting. I wasn't as impressed with the food narratives and recipe descriptions that often introduced the chapter, though I understood what the author was trying to do with them. Unfortunately to me they felt a bit on the nose, or unnecessary to just say whatever was trying to be said.
I enjoyed how this book equally saw Roberta's struggles for romance and for friendship/companionship, and how it implied throughout that both are worthy if not equal pursuits. If you've struggled making friends as an adult, it's uplifting to see how Roberta does so too for near a decade of adulthood before finding herself surrounded by several lovely, unique women in a way that she couldn't have expected. I've read other reviews that talk about how it's hard for them to sympathize with Roberta's search for friendship when she frequently turns down offers from her flatmates to socialize and generally refuses to help herself - and while that frustrates me too, I think it's indicative of that feeling where you'd prefer not to try so that you aren't stung by failure rather than seize those opportunities for potential friendship only to still end up alone. Even with Supper Club's issues (as some other reviews have mentioned), I would still venture to read another Lara Williams book in the future.