I managed to finish this book, but it was very hard going. I really did not enjoy this book at all! I didn’t like the style of the writing and I didn’t like how the main character was narrating her friends lives as though she was living their lives. I felt as though it was very anti men. I know that one character a male had been accused of sexual acts and exposing himself to women, but it wasn’t handled very well.

All I could take from this book was how anti men these women were. As though their husbands were a waist of space, didn’t see to their needs or were having affairs. How these women were still friends for so long after they had all shared a house when they were at university together is beyond me. Especially seeing one of the characters had a long running affair with one of her so called friends husbands, and when she found out about it they still ended up being friends.

I really don’t have anything positive to say about this book, it was so hard going to read. I kept on reading hoping that it would get better. Sadly it didn’t and as for the end of the book I was totally baffled. I also felt that this book made me feel depressed while reading it.

Stella, Helena, Kay, Polly and Priss all met when they shared a house together at university. Twenty years down the line as they are all approaching their fortieth birthdays. They are still friends, but not quite in the same way.

Stella: Narrates whats going on in her friends lives, how they are or aren’t coping with family life. She and her husband have separated as things weren’t as they should be. When Stella did everything she could to get pregnant for the second time it pushed her husband away. So they live separately and share the parenting.

Helena: Is a documentary presenter. She’s single and wan’t a baby so she and her gay best friend decide to have a baby together. While she is pregnant she meets a younger woman and they start to have a relationship, but Helena’s pregnancy put strains on their relationship as her partner doesn’t want children.

Kay: Is married to a philanderer. Who doesn’t really take much responsibility in helping her with their children. She is struggling mentally and physically and she ends up just going off on her own for a while leaving her husband to deal with everything. As she needs to try and get herself back.

Polly: Is a surgeon who surgically rebuilds young girls and women private parts after they have been mutilated. She is very angry with what has happened to her patients and she seems to keep hold of this anger. She’s also been having an affair with her boss who is old enough to be her father. She eventually puts a stop to their relationship as she know it can’t go anywhere as she realises she wants a proper relationship.

Priss: Seems to have it all. She has a style that others try to copy. Along with having a good looking husband and wonderful children, but it not enough for her she’s fed up of being a stay at home mum. She likes the idea of opening her own little cafe which she eventually does along with help from a man who she ends up having an affair with almost in retaliation for her husbands affair.

Sorry I could not get into this book at all. I did not like the writing style and could not relate with the characters.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

3.5 Stars

Exploring the lives of five friends (Stella, Priss, Polly, Kay, and Helena) as they approach their fortieth birthdays.

I didn't enjoy this book. This is not to say that this isn't a really well written book, it just wasn't too my tastes. I think the biggest issue that I had with this book was that I only have a handful of things in common with the women in this book and I found it very difficult to relate to them.

Other issues that I had were:
- the chapters at the start of the book felt really long making it hard to get to grips with the individual storylines... this wasn't really an issue beyond the initial chapters introducing each character
- I kept confusing Priss and Polly (this very much could have been my idiot brain and not down to Feigel's writing)
- The book was written in present tense
- The book is from Stella's PoV which didn't sit well as she was explaining her friends' thoughts and feelings and felt voyeuristic when she was describing their sexual activities
- There was a #MeToo storyline that was really uncomfortable to read as the characters seemed to refuse to believe that the abuser was guilty.
- The book just ends and leaves a lot of the characters' stories feeling unfinished - I am not sure if I actually don't mind this as it is very much as metaphor for life.

This book was very difficult to get into and I’m afraid I had to abandon it before the end.The style of writing did not engage me and I found it difficult to relate to the characters.
My thanks to net galley, the publisher and the author for an advance copy in return for an honest review.

⭐1 Star⭐ 

This book details a year in the life of five women turning forty. And it felt like it took forty years to read. Although the book markets itself as fiercely intelligent, It doesn't reveal anything I don't already know, sexism exists, some women fight against it, others perpetuate it. This is a novel about the problems of middle-class white women and although I can be engaged by a book about anyone I didn't find this one particularly compelling. 

A summary of my thoughts before I DNFed at 60%. 

As a lesbian, the talk of lesbians was literally the worst thing I have read in a long time. It seems 2020 is bring out a new wave of debut authors that are more concerned about their diversity quota than representing their queer characters realistically. This is my review and my opinion but when I have spoken to other reviewers on the LGBT+ spectrum it seems most of us came to the resounding conclusion that this is not how we prefer to be represented. It felt as if it was written for men and straight women with scenes that are at once both fetishising and stereotypical. This coming from a bisexual main character who attempts to stereotype herself more than once was equally as infuriating. Discussions of sexuality lacked any nuance and although it began conversations about lesser talked about topics (the desire to be a mother while identifying as an wlw) I felt like they weren’t given the development they needed to be successful. 

The novel downplays all mentions of sexual assault. And although the blurb mentions the #MeToo movement this book added nothing new to the conversation, it felt reactionary in the worst way. 

Overall, it illuminates nothing about white middle-class society that I don't already know and you cannot get from reading other novels like Big Little Lies which discuss the flaws of this societal cast with more finesse. For a novel said to provoke empathy, I found myself pitying the characters and their endlessly dull lives rather than feeling any compassion for them. For a book like this to be successful, I think it would have to do a better job at evoking this sympathy. 

Trigger Warnings: Abortions, Sexism, Abuse.

(DNF after three months of trying)

The Group Review

First I would like to thank NetGalley and also the author Lara Feigel as well as the publishers JM Originals for allowing me to read this book first before release.
Due to be released 2nd July 2020. I saw this advertised through my book group on the social media platform Facebook.

On NetGalley it was advertised as Adult General fiction book. I love getting involved in different ERAs, worlds and lives. Seeing how different relationships grow and sizzle out it’s the one of the main reasons I love reading. I love to get invested into a book and I was not disappointed with this one! I am so so glad I to get approved this story but sadly it did not come up to my expectations.

The cover shows a beige background with some darker colours with the title and authors name - it’s very plain than what I usually go for but it was an interesting kind of book to look at. I am someone who judges a book by its cover I usually only pick books that peaks my interest this book made me want to read it such an interesting cover so plain and interesting.

The book description shows a story of a group of female friends turning forty - it definitely holds promise but I just couldn’t get stuck into the book I kept getting uninterested in it. I am unsure if it’s me because it’s not my usual type of book I go for but I did try and it was OK for the best part I tried powering through it but I just couldn’t finish the book.

A 3 star read sadly was not my type of book.

I found this book quite difficult to get in to and really had to persevere to finish it. Despite the characters coming to life in the book it really wasn’t quite my cup of tea

I requested this as I am in my late thirties (as much as I might not want to believe that!) and I felt I would relate to the story as I often find myself wondering about my life and whether I’m where I want to be. 

We join the group in March and follow them through their lives until December the same year. The chapters move between the characters but the story is essentially being told in first person narrative by Stella. I have no problem with first person narrative and actually find it often helps immerse me into the story but in this case I just didn’t feel that it worked. For starters, Stella is an extremely unreliable narrator and her own feelings and prejudices then colour the whole book. I found her to be quite pretentious and for someone who claims that this group of friends is important to her she isn’t a very good friend to most of the group; including having an affair with one of the husbands. 

First person narrative also doesn’t really work when you want to split the story between multiple characters unless you have each person tell their own story. The chapters focusing on the other women were written as if Stella was writing about them but she was still including comments detailing their thoughts and feelings. It just didn’t feel realistic to me. It was as though each woman would have sat down and told Stella all about their day in excruciating detail so she could then reiterate it in her book and at one point she even refers to the fact that she’s writing this although the rest of the book kind of sets out that Kay would be the writer amongst them. 

I’ve never known a book so full of unlikeable characters. Sometimes you read a book and get the odd character that you really don’t take to but, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t like any of them!  They were all either self-involved and arrogant or forgettable drips. To help write my reviews I make a few notes as I go along and for one particular character all I’ve written is “Stella slept with her husband”. There was nothing else really about her that stood out. 

It also felt like Feigel had decided to cover all her bases as far as character types go; Stella is a single Mum having recently separated from her husband, Priss is a stay at home Mum wanting more from life, Polly is a Consultant Gynaecologist who is sleeping with a married colleague, Helena is bisexual and thinking of having a child with a friend of hers who is gay, and finally Kay is a teacher with two kids who wanted to be an author but gave that idea up when her husband became one instead. 

At times the writing was quite academic in style, which felt an odd choice considering the characters themselves spend most of their time gossiping about other members of the group. It actually made me a little sad as I couldn’t help but feel that Feigel must never have had a close group of friends in her life if this is how she thinks they behave.  There was no real flow to the story and no plot structure as far as a beginning, middle and end goes. It ends as abruptly as it starts and it is almost like I just read part of someone’s diary. 

There was a slightly odd attempt at being topical by including some references to the Me Too movement with Stella’s boss at the publishing house she works for being accused of acting inappropriately with several female authors.  He also happens to be Helena’s Uncle, which is how Stella got the job in the first place, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know!  This isn’t handled with the greatest amount of sensitivity and the characters’ behaviours and thoughts on this are often put down to being due to their age, which I totally disagree with. 

This book was genuinely a struggle for me and I feel like I can usually find something that I liked even if I didn’t enjoy most of it but I really couldn’t with this. Maybe it was a clashing of experiences; I went into this book expecting to find a relatable group of women and instead found the complete opposite, maybe it’s just that their middle class experiences are different to my working class ones.

Although I finished this book I didn’t actually enjoy it as much I had hoped too. It appealed to me as I was of a similar age to the women in The Group and I was intrigued by the blurb, wondering how my life would compare to the characters in it. To be honest, I found them completely self-obsessed and slightly dull. Regrets of childless-ness, affairs, new jobs and relationships. Not so different from the topics I discuss with my own friends but I didn’t really want to read about them. For me the book felt flat and dull, and I’m not sure why I finished it.

I tried reading this book three or four times, eventually got to 40% and gave up. The premise of this interested me and is a genre I normally enjoy reading so I really don’t know if it’s me or the writing, however I gave this two stars because of this, others may like it more than I did. Thanks Netgalley for ARC.

My gosh. I found this book so difficult to get into, but somehow forced myself through the first chunk, because I’d already downloaded my ARC and I’m trying to make the most of all of the reading material I have. The Group is voyeuristic look into the lives of a group of female friends turning forty. It’s a pastiche of contemporary life and friendship, and supposedly delves into fraught relationships and tensions amongst the group.

I just wasn’t so sure.

I abandoned this book at 10%, which is already longer than I wanted to read. The characters seemed extremely privileged; relentlessly so. Problems raised by Stella seemed to be non-problems, given the current climate, and whilst I appreciated that I perhaps wasn’t the target audience, it was almost unbearable to sift through. The story is told in third-person, and I think this stylistic element would work were it not for a total lack of dialogue to help move the pace along, or for the fact that Stella didn’t seem to be an inwards-looking character at all. It just fell totally flat.

This could have been a brilliant book but the writing style didn't allow me to really engage with any of the characters and it left me feeling cold. I tried to get used to the single narrator but she was so omnipresent it always felt forced. I struggled to finish this book and when I did it ended abruptly.

With a nod to Mary McCarthy, Feigel’s “Group” of five women met at university. But in their case Oxford where they shared accommodation. Some were “first generation” university students others were from more financially secure backgrounds. But it is now twenty years later and all are living in London.  Their “stories” since meeting are recounted over the course of a year by Stella, who is struggling. So journaling month by month she will reflect on specific issues for herself and the other four as they develop.   Stella has divorced her husband but has chosen to have their second child alone so is balancing a brand  new baby, older daughter, while living alone and working full time in a publishing firm facing management issues.  Kay, supposedly once the most intelligent woman and with the greatest promise, had married early to a writer now very successful. She had resigned herself to teaching literature and has recently had her second child too. Over the year she will start to rebuild her creative life after an emotional crisis. Priss, previously a history student, has married Ben a literary agent. She did not choose to develop a career and with children was a full time mum. Finding that her husband has had an affair with Stella she will be questioning her life choices, although wanting to retain her marriage. She will set up her own café business and start to move into other circles.  Polly, single, is a successful senior doctor but with a married lover (her boss). She leads an otherwise quiet life, financially supporting her parents back home. She is reaching the time where she has to decide if she wants to have children and if so with whom. She will finally reject her lover. Helena, apparently the most successful, is a famous documentary producer. She is gay and with her time clock ticking too has to decide how she will have a child and with whom. But can she sustain a new relationship with another at the same time as a single pregnancy?
This is a clever novel that uses the relationships of the five to explore many of the quandaries of women of a certain age. You have one life only, but it sits within the time you live in, with all the constraints or expectations that it has brought with it. The group met at university – at a time when they were trying to create a new life for themselves away from their families. As the friendship continues the group are the people who each have the longest relationship with each other and who have seen themselves both young and now growing older. Within the five individual links might be deeper or more significant, but that too can be fluid as their life experiences change.  Modern life with dispersed families and movement away from one’s early home means that friendships can provide key stability and security at times of challenge or difficulty.
This is also a novel talking to the changes in women’s lives but is also very much of its time. Overlain with the day to day realities of the five is the “issue” of the “me too” generation. Stella’s boss in the publishing house, Helena’s uncle, is accused of inappropriate touching of women around him in the past. As these allegations become more widespread, the five will have to consider their responses (both personal and professional). They suspect that refusal to loudly and publicly condemn such actions – as those of us of a certain generation know were absolutely standard in nearly all workplaces – will be seen as collusion and a sign that they are “unfit” to work within modern professional spheres. Social mores are changing – and apparently very, very, fast. The women are being required to move into places they are not necessarily happy to be. Not least because they come from a generation where aspects of intimate life were not carried on in such a “public” way – and not opened to scrutiny by all – often with little consideration for future impacts. 
So a seemingly simple storyline carries great depth of analysis and meaning. It is not just about now but about one’s evolving past. It is about the personal – about coping with basic day to day demands of womanhood, motherhood and friendship in a changing “political” world with even more rapidly changing expectations.  Twenty years on from university, the women face their next twenty, but their stories (as is life) are unresolved – do not expect immediate happy endings. This is “reality” fiction.

Feigel writes in fluid and evocative prose, capturing the British middle-class ‘everywoman’ in its portraits of five university friends. Yet The Group is somewhat less than the sum of its parts, and the novel as a whole is somewhat like the character Kay’s Chiswick home: ‘tasteful, forgettable’. The source of this may well lie in Feigel’s choice of narrative perspective: a member of the group who voyeuristically but uninterestingly slips into free indirect discourse, creating a distance which makes it impossible to begin to care for the narrator, her friends or the mundane situations they find themselves in. At times, the novel reads as literary or cultural criticism clothed in characters, where the inverse is desirable from a work of fiction.

Feigel notes her influence from Mary McCarthy, and she makes a bold intertextual claim by inheriting her title from the earlier work. Unfortunately, it is here that the boldness ends. If Feigel’s intention was to demonstrate that the taboos of women’s experience in the 1960s have been neutered in the 2020s, she succeeds very well.

Nevertheless, in its introspection and frank displays of philosophy, there is much in Feigel’s writing to prompt reflection on this narrow band of society and certain moments of one’s own life.

I couldn’t get into this book at all. I tried a few times to go back to it but the writing style wasn’t for me. And interesting premise and the characters were real but I’m afraid I couldn’t finish it.

A sincere thank you to the publisher, author and Netgalley for providing me an ebook copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.  This is not my usual genre, I’m more of a crime/thriller reader therefore am extremely pleased and grateful for opening up my mind to something totally different. 4 stars 🌟🌟🌟🌟

My thanks to Netgalley for my copy of The Group, an intellectually written novel about a group of women friends as they approach their forties.

Despite the references to the #metoo movement and Love Island I felt that the novel felt less up to modern and almost seemed to be set, maybe in the 1940s. These women, members of the 'group'  come across as a bunch of white, middle class, smug and self obsessed individuals that I found very hard to like or even empathise with.

I found that the fact that it was narrated by just one voice who seemed to know exactly what was happening, even what the others were thinking long after she'd left and gone home quite disconcertingly confusing at times.

I find it hard to understand why their brand of feminism has to cast all men as the enemy, although I appreciate that they didn't take it as far as the women younger than them now do.

Although I found it a strange book it wasn't an effort to read but it gave me no real pleasure and I was totally nonplussed when it just finished, no conclusion, nothing.

I found this very difficult to engage with unfortunately - the style of writing just didn’t absorb me?l, and the number of characters made it difficult to read without having any emotional attachment to them. 

I’m glad I persevered, but it’s not one I’ll reread.

Stella, Priss, Helena, Kay and Polly are old university friends . We meet them twenty years later as they negotiate children, work, divorce, adultery and depression. 

I think that Laura Fiegel can write, but this novel seems to be some sort of experiment with the fictional form, in which you write with as little emotional engagement as possible.  It was like looking down the wrong end of a telescope. Stella is the omniscient narrator but towards the end of the novel Kay, who has struggled with depression, begins to write her own novel. So i did wonder if this novel is in fact meant to be the novel that Kay herself writes, the emotional distance and flat prose meant to indicate her own state of mind. 
The five women are virtually indistinguishable from each other. Again i feel that this is deliberate but it doesn't make for very enoysble reading. I couldn't relate to their dislike of their children, or their endless extramarital affairs. It was a real struggle to finish this.

I did enjoy reading this book and to see how everyone’s lives are different and how it’s ok to be different and feel different things. However I was a bit confused at the end. It didn’t really seem to end even though I know the book went through the months and it was December when the book ended but I felt it lacked something.