Book No. 94 of 2020
I absolutely loved this book, which is about so many things: young adulthood, feminism, love, values, mentorship, etc. I will never tire of nerdy, book-obsessed heroines, and I was stunned by how ACCURATELY Wolitzer nails the feeling of discovering feminism and your values in college, of being in your early twenties and trying to figure life out, of aching to turn a dream of the future (going to an Ivy League, moving to NYC) into reality and stumbling along the way. She also totally nails the obsessive reverence you get for heroes who just seem to get you, and the headiness of being mentored by your heroes, and then the bittersweet journey of outgrowing those mentors.
There are also touching undercurrents of grief and bitterness running through the story—one heartbreaking event completely upends where you think one character’s development is going (and Wolitzer sets up the expectation for it to parallel another dynamic in the story). Multiple characters discover themselves with an awareness that calls your attention to larger issues and themes, most of which revolve around feminism—how it is seen and needed in everyday life, how second wave feminism clashes with progressive and inclusive movements, how mainstream feminist values are often co-opted into corporate feel-good initiatives, how mediocre men keep failing upward, etc.
Similar Reads
I was very reminded of Sally Rooney’s Normal People.
A lot of the feminist themes reminded me of Mary Beard’s Women and Power, Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies, Lindy West’s The Witches Are Coming, and Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror.