Literary reviews by Tim Love.
Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.

Saturday 9 July 2022

"Promising Young Women" by Caroline O’Donoghue

An audio book. Jane, 26, is about to split from Max, who has found a barrister to live with. She starts doing well at work and sleeps with her married boss Clem (though she'd meant to sleep with a younger man who she's fancied for a while). She's suddenly promoted. Clem's 18+ years older than her and asks about her dad, who left the family when Jane was young. Jane consoled her mother, which was a trigger for her becoming an unpaid anonymous online agony aunt since university.

The agony aunt material and the work-related research that she does about women's needs should help with her own life.

She's getting mysterious e-mail. She discovers it's from someone who's worried about her, someone who tells her than one of Clem's many ex's committed suicide' Jane's losing weight. Clem takes credit for the work she did. She posts a question to her own blog. More people are worried about her. They seem to know a lot about her. She sees posts by her that she doesn't recall sending. She fears she's losing touch with reality. Clem's attention turns to Jane's colleague Derla. Jane meets Clem's wife, who knows what's going on - she's pregnant. The mysterious informer is the wife's sister.

When Jane catches Clem date-raping (drugging?) Derla, Clem attacks Jane. The police keep him overnight and think they can get proof to support what seems obvious anyway, but will the police believe her?

The book deals with many issues and tries hard to tick the right boxes. Most sections seem too wordy to me. Jane expects sympathy from females but more often they blame her. I like how the meeting rooms are named - India, Copenhagen, etc. There are interesting phrases - "She has an Isabella Rosillini look of elsewhere"; "his voice is an oil slick - dangerous, too much colour." But experienced Clem's final mistake seems out of character, and she had several chances to reject Clem even on the first night. Perhaps Clem kept her on drugs.

Other reviews

  • Vera Sugár (Caroline O’Donoghue has decided to tackle some of the most relevant issues concerning young women of the twenty-first century: gender imbalance at the workplace, career versus personal life, growing degrees of separation from friends and family, and grappling with adulthood in an era that demands that girls become women at an increasingly young age. Promising Young Women starts out very promising indeed ... The entire book is written in an engaging and often satirical voice, which only occasionally suffers from over-explaining or repetition. As the book proceeds to explore further Jane’s workplace affair, things become quite muddled, and take a turn for the dramatic. Introducing magical realism and thriller-esque elements, the novel veers towards a mix of genres where no single thread can really emerge as dominating. The original realist viewpoint is lost to what feels more like commercial women’s fiction. Characterisation suffers greatly – apart from Jane, none of the characters are truly explored, leaving them feeling somewhat shallow and one-dimensional. Jane often does not read like a 26-year-old. Clem is pictured as a villain; Becky, the loyal supporter, and Deb, an older co-worker as the mentor figure. There is no real spectrum between black and white characters.)
  • Sarah Gilmartin (There is so much to like in Caroline O’Donoghue’s debut novel that it’s best to get the downside out of the way quickly. A shift from the pitch perfect intimacy of the novel’s first half towards an ill-judged thrilleresque storyline of anonymous blog messages and underdeveloped mental health issues, bloats an otherwise charming novel about a millennial woman making her way in the world.)

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