Picked this up as I really admired the author's previous book, Free Woman - a brave midlife memoir mixed with a biography of Doris Lessing and an astute exploration of female emancipation.

Did not enjoy this. I can see what Feigel was trying to do but the end result is so middle of the road, and I'd instantly forgotten all characters and plot developments an hour or so after reading.

I very strongly disliked this book.

The story is told from the POV of one character, the narrator, Stella. I found Stella and her group of university friends to be obnoxious and unlikeable.

The writing style is good; however without empathy or sympathy for any of the characters I could not enjoy the plot or care about the outcome.

Not for me.

An interesting premise for a book and one that appealed to me as I am crawling ever closer to 40 however I struggled with the style of writing and just could not get invested unfortunately.

This is a look at the lives of 5 women who met at university and are now all turning 40. It was an interesting premise as the story is told by one woman, Stella, but she narrates the others‘ sections too, which gets rather confusing when they start talking about her, and you feel like you don't get the full picture, but I guess that's the point.

The novel covers friendship, relationships, affairs, motherhood and the #metoo movement. There were some times when I felt that the character's 'beliefs' were a way of the author getting her beliefs across - some rather long-winded rants.

I can see how some find this novel annoying as the women are all relatively privileged and do get rather whiny but I quite enjoyed it.

This book wasn’t for me. In the blurb it said it was funny but I didn’t laugh once. Not for me. Very misleading blurb

Interesting and intelligent, as if you were sharing a bottle of wine with your smartest girlfriends in a philosophical mood. Five friends are on the cusp of turning 40, each with their own privileged, existential crisis. Essentially the group conversations are a launchpad for exploring modern ideas around marriage, motherhood, procreation, sex and sexuality. The book cleverly interweaves all these different conversations, simultaneously using them to drive the plot. This is not easy, quick reading and requires thoughtfulness and concentration. But it will make you think and open your eyes to views other than your own.

The Group by Lara Feigel left me perplexed. Like the name suggests, this is a story of 5 white, British women from different professional and largely middle to higher income backgrounds, united by the fact that they will all be 40 soon.

I decided to read this because it’s very hard to find books about older women in current publishing culture.

What’s interesting about The Group is its unapologetic acceptance of what a privileged life these women have. I appreciate this perspective because it’s just as true as the narrative of the underprivileged.

What I liked less was how the five just felt like they were one. They have potentially interesting elements to them like suppressed talents, issues with violation, exploring bisexuality, all of which could make the book a great modern read for 40 somethings but we do not quite get there.

I spent a lot of time thinking is this deliberate? Is she making them so monolithic because that’s the reality? The author is a professor of literature so I don’t think this could be beyond her but the question I would have is what’s the point in writing another soulless mid life drama?

The second half of the book is better than the first and I loved the subliminal anger they all feel but cannot communicate. Priss in trying to be open, cheats on her husband as a way to punish him for his infidelity with her best friend. The fact that the two women then celebrate a birthday together is interesting. I appreciate Feigel not falling into the angry woman trope but the book still left me uninspired.

As a reviewer, I felt very out of place as this would not be a own voice review but the futility of this book, just keeps affecting me. I would be curious to know what other white, female reviewers feel about it.

I did not enjoy this book. The writing style was hard to follow, I did bot know which of the five characters were speaking or sharing their thoughts at any given time.
The characters did not stand out from one another; this added to the confusion. I found it hard to keep up with which one of the characters was discussing the details of their lives.

They characters were uninspiring. They all had education and privilege and yet they were all dissatisfied with their lot in life. I don't have to like a character to like a book, but the fact that I didn't like any of these characters added to my lacklustre enthusiasm for finishing this book.
Thank you to Netgalley for this advanced copy and to the publisher and author. I wish you well in your future books.

I found this book very hard going and just couldn't enjoy the style of writing. The story is told from one person POV and she narrates the other girls in her uni group. None of their storylines grabbed me at all.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the copy in exchange for a honest review.

The Group is the story of university friends who are starting to turn 40. Each chapter is dedicated to a member of the group and is narrated by Stella, one of the group. She narrates the chapters on the other friends as if she is with them but in fact she isn't and this is confusing as she relates a lot of what is happening to herself and comes across as judgemental and a bit bitchy.
It is hard to warm to this group of friends as individuals and as a group, in fact the story doesn't really portray them as friends - more just people who have kept in contact because they feel they should.
If you are expecting a funny story about female friendship then this may not be the novel for you, but maybe it is closer to real life friendships.

I was given a copy of The Group by Netgalley and the publishers in return for an unbiased review.

The Group is about the lives of five women who met at university, narrated by the main character Stella. She describes how their lives have panned out now they are all in their early forties living in London. Some of the details are unbelievable as Stella continues to narrate the most intimate details of her friends - I felt that these observations were therefore her opinion and added to the gossipy, and at times snide, comments about them.
I was dissatisfied with the preoccupation of the trivial events that seemed to dominate the women's lives and I felt in the end it lacked substance but I also found it entertaining and fun at times.
Thanks to netgalley for the ARC

I am grateful to NetGalley and John Murray for an advance review copy, but I have to say that I found this to be a supremely irritating novel.

The narrator Stella is one of a group of nearly-40-year-old women who have been friends since university. The novel is structured in sections for each of them, all narrated by Stella, punctuated by sections in her own voice about her.

The style is flat, monotonous, a relentless stream of “she said x, then the other one said y, and I thought z”. There is more direct speech than I thought at first, but speech marks aren’t used much of the time, though they sometimes - why? - and the five women all sound the same as reported by Stella (who, ironically, is a successful writer), so that even halfway through the book I was still struggling to remember which was who amongst them.

I couldn’t work out what the book was actually about - friendship? Femalehood? Marriage? Motherhood? The three with children seem so traumatised and exhausted by the experience that you have to wonder why on earth, approaching their forties, they keep defining themselves in terms of their relationships and maternity and encouraging the two childless ones to have a baby. Especially irritating is the repeated reference to having children as ‘procreation’, which comes across as coy and po-faced.

They are a collective cliche: talented writer squandering her gift because her less talented husband got there before her, dissatisfied with her marriage, her children, her unfulfilled life. Bisexual documentary maker planning a baby with her gay male friend. Divorcee who got pregnant with her ex husband’s baby by IVF. Successful consultant with a guilty secret, having an affair with a colleague 25 years older. A pattern of older husbands. Much focus on the sacredness of their friendship dating back to university, but also a fair bit of malice in Stella’s portrayal of her friends.

All in all, this novel bored me and left a nasty taste in my mouth - I just could not identify or sympathise with a bunch of unpleasant, emotionally dithering women without the backbone to acknowledge the things that aren’t working in their lives and get on with fixing them or walking away. I’m afraid I didn’t bother finishing it.

It is rare that I feel ambivalent about a novel.

I think that the observational style of of book stopped me from feeling a strong pull and connection to the characters and the situations they encounter. Whilst I finished the book I am not sure that the outcome was what I expected from the description of the novel and I was expecting a more nuanced look at female friendships.

Lara Feigel’s memoir Free Woman was one of my favourite books of 2018. In it she interrogates conventions of marriage and motherhood while rereading the works of Doris Lessing – The Golden Notebook (1962), in particular, dramatizes women’s struggles to combine their disparate roles into a harmonious identity. Drawing inspiration from Lessing as well as from another early feminist novel, The Group by Mary McCarthy*, Feigel’s debut novel crafts a kaleidoscopic portrait of five women’s lives in 2018.

Stella, Kay, Helena, Polly and Priss met at a picnic while studying at Oxbridge and decided to rent a house together. Now 40-ish, they live in London and remain close, though their lives have branched in slightly different directions. Kay is an English teacher but has always wanted to be a novelist like her American husband, Harald. Priss is a stay-at-home mother excited to be opening a café. Polly, a gynaecological consultant at St Thomas’s Hospital, is having an affair with a married colleague. Helena, a single documentary presenter, decides she wants to have a baby and pursues insemination via a gay friend.

Narrating her friends’ lives as well as her own is Stella, an editor at a Faber-like publishing house whose director (also Helena’s uncle) is under investigation for sexual misconduct. Stella, a stand-in for the author, has split from her husband and has a new baby via IVF as well as an older child; this hint of autofiction lends the book an intimacy it might have lacked with an omniscient perspective. Although you have to suspend disbelief in a few places – could Stella really know so many details of her friends’ lives? – it feels apt that she can only understand these other women in relation to herself. Her voice can be catty, but is always candid, and Feigel is astute on the performative aspects of femininity.

Fast-forward a Sally Rooney novel by about 20 years and you’ll have an idea of what to expect here. It is a sexually frank and socially engaged narrative that arose from the context of the #MeToo movement and fully acknowledges the privilege and limitations of its setting. The characters express guilt over lamenting middle-class problems while there is such suffering in the wider world – we glimpse this in Polly’s work with African girls who have undergone genital mutilation. The diversity is limited to Black boyfriends, Helena’s bisexuality, and the fact that one group member decides not to have children (that 1 in 5 is statistically accurate).

The advantage of the apparent heterogeneity in the friend group, though, is that it highlights depths of personality and subtleties of experience. Stella even sees herself as an amateur anthropologist:
So here we are then. Five exact contemporaries who once shared a cluttered, thin-walled student house off the Cowley Road, all privileged, white, middle-class, all vestigial hangers-on, left over from an era when we received free educations at our elite university and then emerged into a world where we could still just about find jobs and buy flats, provided with opportunities for selfishness and leisure by our cleaners and our childminders. Nothing very eventful happens to us, but that gives more room for the ethnographer in me to get to work.

Feigel previously wrote two group biographies of cultural figures of the Second World War era, and she applies that precise skill set – capturing the atmosphere of a time period; noting similarities but also clear distinctions between people – to great effect here. You’ll recognize aspects of yourself in all of the characters, and be reminded of how grateful you are for (or how much you wish you had) friends whom you know will always be there for you. It’s an absorbing and relevant novel that ranks among my few favourites of the year so far. (4.5 stars)

*Feigel borrows the names of four of her five group members, plus those of some secondary characters, from McCarthy, with Stella a new character perhaps inspired in part by McCarthy’s Libby, who wants to work with books but, after delivering an earnest report on a 500-page pot-boiler, hears that “we really have no work that you’re uniquely qualified to do. You’re one of thousands of English majors who come pouring out of the colleges every June, stage-struck to go into publishing.” (That sure sounds familiar!) Narrowing the circle and introducing a first-person narrator were wise choices that made Feigel’s version more accessible. Both, though, are characterized by forthright commentary and a shrewd understanding of human motivations.

I rarely DNF a book but I’m sorry to say that I admitted defeat with The Group.
I read just over a quarter of the book and here are my main reasons for quitting!:
1. I was not a fan of the writing style. At times I was confused if another character was saying something or if it was the main character. There was a lack of clarity and quotation marks.
2. The characters were not likeable. They were boring, miserable and selfish.
3. Everybody had a lack of morals and were having (or had) an affair.
4. It was dull. I stopped at a little over quarter the way through and nothing had happened. For me, it was slow and painful.

For my age, I should be the target audience, however, I do not have children. This was not my insomnia curing cup of tea.

I appreciate the advance copy of this book from NetGalley and the publishers. These opinions are my own (clearly!).

The promise of the blurb didn't come across in the execution. I don't normally mind books written in this style (Reservoir 13 for one) but this was just weird. Stella discussing the sex lives of her friends was odd. The lack of passion, plot or person other than Stella also unfortunately worked against this book. A brave attempt at a different approach but it didn't quite work.

I honestly do not know what to think of this book.

The way The Group has been written is almost like a study of a friendship group, or a study of women over the age of 40. It's written almost like an observation (which, I suppose, it's just that - Stella's observation of her friends).

I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of the storyline of the book really is, other than an in-depth look at the relations between friends. There are hints of '#MeToo' style issues but the conversation around these is actually uncomfortable - to the point where I began to despise the main character.

I don't think I'd recommend this book as I'm unsure who, outside of the context of Netgalley, would enjoy it.

I received an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, John Murray Press, and Laura Feigel.
Unfortunately the above is the only reason I carried on reading this book, when I would definitely have given up and abandoned it long before.
A novel covering a group of 40-something women, all fundamentally unlikeable characters preoccupied with the ennuie of their own lives and an overwhelming sense of self-importance.
It is not, as the description says, a engrossing portrait of contemporary female life and friendship. It is dry, hard work, and unfortunately not worth the time.
A generous 2 stars.

I really wanted to like this book as the synopsis seemed right up my street. However I was very disappointed as there seemed to be no plot, no likeable characters and in fact some of them merged into one. I felt the book dragged and I didn’t look forward to picking it up again. I’m sorry but this wasn’t one for me.

Lara Feigel is a writer, critic and cultural historian teaching in the English department at King's College London and is the author non-fiction books including The Love-Charm of Bombs, The Bitter Taste of Victory and Free Woman. The Group is her first attempt at writing fiction. Given Feigel's background it makes perfect sense that she used a ground-breaking and controversial novel as inspiration. Mary McCarthy's The Group was published in 1963 and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for two years and described the lives of four colleague graduates in 1933.

Full review on my blog at https://wanderingwestswords.wordpress.com/2020/07/04/the-group-lara-feigel/