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tachyondecay 's review for:
So Thrilled For You
by Holly Bourne
challenging
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
As always, a new Holly Bourne novel is an instabuy for me at this point. One thing I have loved about Bourne is how she has rigorously pursued her own eras to an almost Taylor Swiftian degree: from her young adult novels to her novels about single women in their late twenties and early thirties to this, a novel about women having (and not having) kids. While perhaps a slightly chrononormative progression, that’s the only thing normative about Bourne’s oeuvre, which otherwise attempts to subvert our expectations for what is often pigeonholed as “women’s fiction.” So Thrilled For You is about a baby shower gone horribly wrong. It’s about female friendship. It’s about pregnancy and childbirth. Yet these descriptions don’t do it justice.
Four women—Nicki, Lauren, Steffi, and Charlotte—were inseparable in college. Now in their thirties, they have found their own paths but are reconvening for Nicki’s baby shower—planned by Charlotte, who has been trying but has yet to conceive a baby herself. Lauren has an energetic and demanding baby of her own, and Steffi is childfree by choice and extremely committed to her new career establishing her own literary agency. On top of this, Bourne adds a frame story: someone sets off a gender-reveal smoke grenade at the shower that causes a devastating fire, and as each chapter switches the perspective to a different woman, a detective inspector intercedes with questions of her own for this group of so-called friends….
Part of me wishes I could say I can relate directly to what Bourne writes about here, but the truth is that I have attended precious few baby showers and none since I transitioned. So explain to me why Bourne’s depiction of these events feels so true and accurate?? It’s not that it’s stereotypical. She’s just really damn good at capturing the complexity and conflict within so many female friendships, especially group friendships, and that I can relate to.
By alternating third-person limited perspectives, Bourne helps to develop these four women into three-dimensional characters. Steffi, for example, could easily have been a caricature of a childfree woman who looks down on parents: Nicki and Lauren are, for example, pissed off at her for sharing an article that has antinatal sentiments. Yet Steffi is so much more than her identity as someone who doesn’t have kids. In the chapters from her perspective, we see her hard work and sacrifice, the way she is so laser-focused on her career but also at lifting up her author client, Rosa. Yes, there is an element of selfishness and self-centredness to it, such as the way she impatiently ponders how to extract herself early from the baby shower. Steffi is far from perfect. None of them is; that is the point. In the chapters from the other women’s point of view, we see how alienated they feel from Steffi’s life. Bourne shows us all the sides, and while individual readers might find themselves liking or empathizing with one or some of the women more than the others, at the end of the day, none of them is completely in the right or in the wrong.
(Except maybe Charlotte because she is the one who brought the smoke grenade in the first place…. Seriously, Charlotte?)
An unfortunate consequence of living as a woman within patriarchy is that you are never enough. If you have children (what some essentialists would designate as your purpose as a woman), then you also have to somehow live up to the impossible standards of being a perfect mom. If you don’t have children, then you are failing at womanhood. If you choose not to have children, then you are a monster. And while all these modes of existence should be valid and unjudged, patriarchy ensures they aren’t. Patriarchy ensures instead that we judge each other: whether pregnant, mother, TTC, or happily none of the above, we are weighed and measured.
With that being said, another notable feature of this novel is the way Bourne portrays most of the male characters. They are vestigial and somewhat useless. At the same time, Bourne is careful to ensure none of them overshadows the story by becoming an outright villain. So while Nicki’s dad might be using weaponized incompetence and Matt is somewhat of a wanker, the story’s refusal to focus on any of them for more than a few lines sends a clear message: this book isn’t about you. In this way, Bourne emphasizes that discussion of patriarchy, misogyny, and oppression need not centre men—because these phenomena are not something naturally occurring, something that only men do to women. Rather, as this novel points out, it’s something women do to each other well enough without the men involved at all.
So Thrilled For You captures the double standard of female friendship and feminine bonding rituals perfectly. From the fake niceness at the shower to the performance of gratitude for the gifts no one really cared about buying to the need to sideline all your own messy feels for the day … this baby shower is hell on Earth for every single person in attendance! Bourne sets up this clusterfuck and then points to it, as if to say, “This is madness, and we all know it’s madness, yet we keep subjecting each other to it anyway.” But again, the villain here isn’t any particular man or woman or person of any kind: it’s patriarchy. It’s the toxicity of Discourse that seeps into what could otherwise be honest conversations among friends about feelings, expectations, and never being enough.
I think it’s a good sign that her writing is so captivating I didn’t really care about the frame mystery of “who set off the smoke grenade, and was it arson?” The mystery itself is unimportant; I was more interested in the details of the day.
Chrononormativity is tough. Getting older and feeling the weight of expectations—whether you meet them, exceed them, or chuck them by the wayside as you explore different paths—is tough. It’s tough for anyone, regardless of gender; however, in So Thrilled For You, Bourne chooses to focus on some of the ways in which it’s tough for (cis) women. And as usual, she does it very, very well.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
Four women—Nicki, Lauren, Steffi, and Charlotte—were inseparable in college. Now in their thirties, they have found their own paths but are reconvening for Nicki’s baby shower—planned by Charlotte, who has been trying but has yet to conceive a baby herself. Lauren has an energetic and demanding baby of her own, and Steffi is childfree by choice and extremely committed to her new career establishing her own literary agency. On top of this, Bourne adds a frame story: someone sets off a gender-reveal smoke grenade at the shower that causes a devastating fire, and as each chapter switches the perspective to a different woman, a detective inspector intercedes with questions of her own for this group of so-called friends….
Part of me wishes I could say I can relate directly to what Bourne writes about here, but the truth is that I have attended precious few baby showers and none since I transitioned. So explain to me why Bourne’s depiction of these events feels so true and accurate?? It’s not that it’s stereotypical. She’s just really damn good at capturing the complexity and conflict within so many female friendships, especially group friendships, and that I can relate to.
By alternating third-person limited perspectives, Bourne helps to develop these four women into three-dimensional characters. Steffi, for example, could easily have been a caricature of a childfree woman who looks down on parents: Nicki and Lauren are, for example, pissed off at her for sharing an article that has antinatal sentiments. Yet Steffi is so much more than her identity as someone who doesn’t have kids. In the chapters from her perspective, we see her hard work and sacrifice, the way she is so laser-focused on her career but also at lifting up her author client, Rosa. Yes, there is an element of selfishness and self-centredness to it, such as the way she impatiently ponders how to extract herself early from the baby shower. Steffi is far from perfect. None of them is; that is the point. In the chapters from the other women’s point of view, we see how alienated they feel from Steffi’s life. Bourne shows us all the sides, and while individual readers might find themselves liking or empathizing with one or some of the women more than the others, at the end of the day, none of them is completely in the right or in the wrong.
(Except maybe Charlotte because she is the one who brought the smoke grenade in the first place…. Seriously, Charlotte?)
An unfortunate consequence of living as a woman within patriarchy is that you are never enough. If you have children (what some essentialists would designate as your purpose as a woman), then you also have to somehow live up to the impossible standards of being a perfect mom. If you don’t have children, then you are failing at womanhood. If you choose not to have children, then you are a monster. And while all these modes of existence should be valid and unjudged, patriarchy ensures they aren’t. Patriarchy ensures instead that we judge each other: whether pregnant, mother, TTC, or happily none of the above, we are weighed and measured.
With that being said, another notable feature of this novel is the way Bourne portrays most of the male characters. They are vestigial and somewhat useless. At the same time, Bourne is careful to ensure none of them overshadows the story by becoming an outright villain. So while Nicki’s dad might be using weaponized incompetence and Matt is somewhat of a wanker, the story’s refusal to focus on any of them for more than a few lines sends a clear message: this book isn’t about you. In this way, Bourne emphasizes that discussion of patriarchy, misogyny, and oppression need not centre men—because these phenomena are not something naturally occurring, something that only men do to women. Rather, as this novel points out, it’s something women do to each other well enough without the men involved at all.
So Thrilled For You captures the double standard of female friendship and feminine bonding rituals perfectly. From the fake niceness at the shower to the performance of gratitude for the gifts no one really cared about buying to the need to sideline all your own messy feels for the day … this baby shower is hell on Earth for every single person in attendance! Bourne sets up this clusterfuck and then points to it, as if to say, “This is madness, and we all know it’s madness, yet we keep subjecting each other to it anyway.” But again, the villain here isn’t any particular man or woman or person of any kind: it’s patriarchy. It’s the toxicity of Discourse that seeps into what could otherwise be honest conversations among friends about feelings, expectations, and never being enough.
I think it’s a good sign that her writing is so captivating I didn’t really care about the frame mystery of “who set off the smoke grenade, and was it arson?” The mystery itself is unimportant; I was more interested in the details of the day.
Chrononormativity is tough. Getting older and feeling the weight of expectations—whether you meet them, exceed them, or chuck them by the wayside as you explore different paths—is tough. It’s tough for anyone, regardless of gender; however, in So Thrilled For You, Bourne chooses to focus on some of the ways in which it’s tough for (cis) women. And as usual, she does it very, very well.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.