Every member of The House, the most exclusive sorority on campus, and all its alumni, are beautiful, high-achieving, and universally respected.
After a freshman year she would rather forget, sophomore Nina Kaur knows being one of the chosen few accepted into The House is the first step in her path to the brightest possible future. Once she's taken into their fold, the House will surely ease her fears of failure and protect her from those who see a young woman on her own as easy prey.
Meanwhile, adjunct professor Dr. Sloane Hartley is struggling to return to work after accepting a demotion to support her partner's new position at the cutthroat University. After 18 months at home with her newborn daughter, Sloane's clothes don’t fit right, her girl-dad husband isn’t as present as he thinks he is, and even the few hours a day she's apart from her child fill her psyche with paralyzing ennui. When invited to be The House’s academic liaison, Sloane enviously drinks in the way the alumnae seem to have it all, achieving a level of collective perfection that Sloane so desperately craves.
As Nina and Sloane each get drawn deeper into the arcane rituals of the sisterhood, they learn that living well comes with bloody costs. And when they are finally invited to the table, they will have to decide just how much they can stomach in the name of solidarity and power."
Olivie Blake is one of those authors whose books always seem like something I might like, but end up not quite working for me (The Atlas Six in particular left me quite disappointed when I read it a number of years ago). Her writing style has never quite worked for me, but when I saw the premise for Girl Dinner I was so intrigued and had really high hopes that after all this time, maybe this would be the book to make me finally like Olivia Blake’s work. Unfortunately, this optimism did not work out for me and I think I can safely and officially say that Olivia Blake’s work simply isn’t for me.
We follow Nina, new sorority member hopeful, and Dr. Sloane Hartley, a new mom and adjunct professor, as they each deal with their own issues relating to womanhood and adapting to new lifestyles. Both characters brought a lot of depth to the story and were well-developed, but weren't overly captivating. I did enjoy seeing how they leaned into their new roles and how certain revelations affected their choices down the line, as well as how their roles intertwined in various ways.
Girl Dinner really has an intriguing concept and a premise with a lot of potential, but the story itself felt slow and ultimately disappointingly anticlimactic. I kept waiting for something more intense, more unsettling, or truly unexpected to happen, but it never really did. There wasn’t enough momentum building in the first half to make me want to really keep reading, and then by the halfway point I was starting to feel like it was a slog. It’s not until near the end that things get marginally more exciting, and even then it felt lacking.
Blake has a very distinct prose style, and for me it is just far too convoluted and wordy. Her sentences often feel bloated and overfilled with unnecessary words and descriptors. I’m not opposed to authors who take liberties with ‘purple prose,’ but this writing just didn’t flow and caused more disruptions than anything else. I often found myself re-reading lines because they just felt awkward or extended. I don’t mean for this to sound too harsh, but it often comes across as faux intellectualism, which could be okay if it was purposeful to the story, but as it shows up in most of her work, I’m pretty sure it’s just her writing at this point and not on purpose.
I think Blake does a lot of interesting things in this book and talks about some really relevant and compelling topics. For instance, feminine rage, traditional roles and ‘tradwives’ vs. those who rebel against that, feminine values, how women are policed, etc. are all prominent topics, and I think she explores these with a lot of depth. However… in some ways, I think she rambled on about this a bit too much without having as much actual… happenings. It’s a little hard for me to explain in some ways, but I just feel like there was so much talk from our characters about, for instance, motherhood and how much she feels like a horrible mother, or how she worries about fitting in with the sorority and all the issues around that, and somehow this book just ended up feeling so boring and so slow. If I recount everything that actually happened in this book, I don’t understand how it was as long as it was.
Lastly, Girl Dinner is pitched as horror, so I was expecting more, well, horror--especially given the cannibalism themes. Cannibalism is generally a frightening and disturbing concept to most people, but unfortunately the general concept of cannibalism alone doesn’t make something a good horror story. I think this feels more like fiction with a slightly dark twist, which isn’t a bad thing, but it was not quite what I expected, and therefore it felt like a disappointment.
Overall, Girl Dinner has moments of intrigue here and there and shows a lot of potential, so I can see where some readers might really enjoy it, especially if they already like Olivia Blake’s writing. Unfortunately for me, it was too slow, overwritten, and not all that compelling, so it didn’t quite work for me. I still think I like the idea of it more than the actual reading experience. I’d recommend this to those who already enjoy Blake’s writing, but if you are someone on the fence about her, I’m not sure Girl Dinner is going to be enough to convince you.
