Oligarchy

A wicked and slightly cruel comic novel about life in a girl's boarding school where body image and food issues are the norm in a particular group of girls - told from the daughter of a Russian oligarch's PoV. A mystery subplot fails to take flight, but the character of Tash's Aunt Sonja is brilliant. Full review at Shiny New Books here: https://shinynewbooks.co.uk/oligarchy-by-scarlett-thomas/

I don't do this often, but I HATED this book. I know it's meant to be a satire about privileged beautiful boarding school types, but it was so not funny. It's message was awful (especially around body image) and I would keep it as far away from any teenage girl as possible. Detestable characters, boring plot .... just .... no.

Mallory Towers for our late capitalist age. It's bleak, full of disconnection and isolation. Characters are distanced from their families, refuse to speak the same language as others, sneer at other social classes. Everyone in the book seems to have an emptiness at their core, a void that they try to fill with social media and consumerist aspiration, neither of which work. If Thomas' earlier work, like PopCo, was a sally against corporate rule of our lives and a hurrah for sticking it to the Man, this one seems to be an admission of defeat, a surrender of power and slipping down into helpless acquiescence. It's a depressing book but a strangely readable one (and as a parent of a twelve year old girl, it's frankly terrifying).