A review by definebookish
Supper Club by Lara Williams

adventurous reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

For me, Supper Club hit somewhere between Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed and Daisy Buchanan’s Insatiable – but with less sex than either, and more friendship. I liked both of those, and I liked this even more.

Roberta is in her late twenties, working in a job she’s indifferent to, starting to suspect she’ll never have a proper relationship. What she does have is hunger, a love of cooking, and best friend Stevie, who she’s (mutually) obsessed with. Together they launch an underground supper club where women can take up space and indulge their appetites.

This is a dual-timeline type situation, moving between the sometimes hedonistic present and Roberta’s earlier, more subdued life at university. If anything, I expected more hedonism; the supper clubs see Roberta, Stevie and guests gorging on multiple courses, taking pills, and eventually breaking into venues, but that’s a relatively small amount of the narrative. There’s a lot more time spent on Roberta’s relationships – with Stevie, with her well-intentioned but irritatingly rule-following boyfriend, and with her family – and working through the past experiences that trained her to make herself small.

On a couple of occasions, the transition between timelines did lose me a little – cue me rereading five pages to clarify whether the protagonist was having a flashback or just casually cheating on her boyfriend with an ex. For the most part, though, this one hits the spot. It’s witty and poignant and gloriously messy, and the food descriptions are next-level. Special mention to the passages on spaghetti alla puttanesca.
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