Four neighbors start a book club in the early 1960s. They are housewives living in a strictly-planned, new community outside of Washington, DC. Through the friendships forged and the information they absorbed in their first book, the groundbreaking The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, they support one another under the oppressive conditions that exist for women of their time.
The characters in The Book Club for Troublesome Women were fun to get to know and the story was a good reminder of how recently women gained the right to do things that younger generations currently take for granted, like having their own bank account. The story felt very authentic to the time period. The last 20% was the best part as the women began to take more control of their own lives.
Unfortunately, this is the third book about women’s book clubs that I’ve read this year (and it’s only mid-April) so it’s a lot of the same thing, just set in a different time period than the other two novels. While I enjoyed it, this one was the least interesting overall to me, compared to the other two. But I think Marie Bostwick’s book is especially good for women under age 50 to read if they aren’t already familiar with the struggle of women in the mid-20th century.
The audiobook narrator, Lisa Flanagan, was by turns awful and magnificent. As with many narrators, she’s guilty of sounding like a robot during the omniscient narrator sections. In fact, she’s so robotic that, at first, I wondered if she was AI and not a real human. But her voice acting and vocal repertoire was terrific when she was voicing actual characters. So, since her overall performance was so polarizing, I think I’ll give her a B. Looking back at other audiobooks she’s narrated that I’ve listened to, the robot narrator is a very common complaint of mine about her.
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