Book #123 |
Book: The Book Club for Troublesome Women | Author: Marie Bostwick | |
| Source: Library loan Format: Kindle |
Pages: 380 | Duration: 12/08/25 – 12/10/25 (3 days) | |
| Rating: ★★★★★ | Genres: historical fiction, books about books, feminism | ||
| 📕10-word summary: Four friendships forged in a book club prevail in self-discovery. 🖌6-word review: Humorous, thought-provoking, and ultimately hopeful, inspirational. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “Apart from reservations, vodka stingers are the only thing I know how to make.” | |||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: décolletage, Shalimar, toile, bouclé, pavlova, clarion, shantung, zaftig, laminitis, pabulum, ordnance | |||
| Description:* By 1960s standards, Margaret Ryan is living the American woman’s dream. She has a husband” target=”_blank”>, three children, a station wagon, and a home in Concordia — one of Northern Virginia’s most exclusive and picturesque suburbs. She has a standing invitation to the neighborhood coffee klatch, and now, thanks to her husband, a new subscription to A Woman’s Place — a magazine that tells housewives like Margaret exactly who to be and what to buy. On paper, she has it all. So why doesn’t that feel like enough? Margaret is thrown for a loop when she first meets Charlotte Gustafson, Concordia’s newest and most intriguing resident. As an excuse to be in the mysterious Charlotte’s orbit, Margaret concocts a book club get-together and invites two other neighborhood women — Bitsy and Viv — to the inaugural meeting. Nicknaming themselves “the Bettys,” after The Feminine Mystique‘s author Betty Friedan, these 4 friends have no idea their impromptu club and the books they read together will become the glue that helps them hold fast through tears, triumphs, angst, and arguments — and what will prove to be the most consequential and freeing year of their lives.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||
| Thoughts: Not that I’ve ever seen Desperate Housewives, or read or watched The Stepford Wives, but after the first couple of chapters of this book, I thought it might be like what I imagine them to be about. Hoping it wouldn’t be the case, I forged ahead. Fortunately, the 4-women book club reads The Feminine Mystique, the classic by Betty Friedman, which lights a fire in these women and things become more interesting. This is yet another “books about books,” which I’m drawn to, and about which I recently blogged about. In addition to The Feminine Mystique, these books are mentioned in this book: Gift from the Sea (read in 2024), Coming of Age in Samoa, Mansfield Park, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Wuthering Heights (read in 2015), Joy in the Morning, The Girls of Slender Means, The Bell Jar, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A Room of One’s Own, The Second Sex, The Group, Revolutionary Road, Babbit, A Town Like Alice, Herland, Dearly Beloved, The Old Man and the Sea (read in 1991). And finally, ugh, yet another book that used my overused, nemesis word, “conspiratorial.” | |||
See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2025 and previous years: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.
