Fiction Reviews
Girl Dinner
(2025) Olivie Blake, Mantle, £22, hrdbk, 359pp, ISBN 978-1-035-01142-1
The House is the most exclusive sorority on campus; its members and alumni are universally beautiful, high-achieving, and respected. After a freshman year she would rather forget, sophomore Nina Kaur knows being one of the chosen few accepted into The House is the first step in her path to the brightest possible future. Once she’s taken into their fold, the House will surely ease her fears of failure and protect her from those who see a young woman on her own as prey.
Meanwhile, adjunct professor Dr Sloane Hartley is struggling to return to work after accepting a demotion to support her partner’s new position at the cutthroat University. After eighteen months at home with her newborn daughter, Sloane’s clothes don’t fit right; her girl-dad husband isn’t as present as he thinks he is; and even the few hours a day she’s apart from her child fill her psyche with paralysing ennui. When invited to be The House’s academic liaison, Sloane enviously drinks in the way the alumnae seem to have it all, achieving a level of collective perfection that Sloane desperately craves. As Nina and Sloane each get drawn deeper into the arcane rituals of the sisterhood, they learn that living well comes with bloody costs. And when they are finally invited to the table, they will have to decide just how much they can stomach in the name of solidarity and power. Good girls deserve a treat.
Olivie Blake is best known as a fantasy writer, particularly of the Atlas Six books, although she has also written for young adults, and penned several stand-alone novels. Her novel Gifted and Talented also appeared in 2025, with Blake still in fantasy territory with a novel about magic as big business and who will control that business when the founding father of the company dies unexpectantly? Imagine the big companies – Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, as magical entities and their fabulously wealthy owners as magicians and you get a flavour of what Blake is doing by pushing at the fantasy envelope. However, with Girl Dinner she is moving from fantasy into horror, but there is a debate to be had about things like: is it really horror? Is the horror too little, too late? And does the horror element get lost in all the other themes and issues that Blake is tackling? In a novel that she states right at the start of her acknowledgements is meant to be a satire.
What is interesting about Girl Dinner, or more accurately The House featured in the story, is that one character doesn’t want to be there as an academic advisor because The House has a reputation of producing highflyers and does she really want the grief of having to deal with those who live there? But for another character, it is the place where she really wants to be. This is an obvious dichotomy between the two leads, but not the only one. Dr Sloane Hartley had it all, and lost it, by taking a demotion and becoming a mum, and is diminishing in that role and in the shadow cast by her successful, hardly-there, husband.
Meanwhile, second-year student, Nina Kaur, sees being accepted by The House as a stepping stone to fulfilling her ambitions, and getting it all, especially after the dreadful first year that she had which included a sexual assault. But how far are they willing to go to get what they want? And what will it cost them?
The story unfolds over five parts – Recruitment, Education, Initiation, Invitation, and Dinner. Each part begins with a quote from “The Country Wife”, and is followed by a countdown page so we get “Seven Weeks to Initiation”, etc., etc., but once Initiation has passed we get the countdown to Dinner, which we are told is only nine weeks away, but once Dinner arrives we ominously get “? Days Until ?”
I don’t think that I need to confess that as an old, white male, I am not really the target audience for this novel, and that may be the reason why I wasn’t blown away by it. As a horror novel it misses the mark because the horror takes too long to materialise, in fact, everything seems to take too long to do anything. It is slow, very slow to get going, and repetitive; and although the idea, the intentions, the actions of the women in The House, will be horrific when carried out (no spoilers here, just!), they do happen off-screen, or page, to some extent, and also not in the way the reader anticipates. On the other hand it is funny, insightful, razor-sharp in places, especially on the dialogue-front, and it does shed a harsh spotlight on the pressures that women in general have to face, and those particular to women in academia, while knocking lumps out of the notions of the “girl dinner” and the “clean girl” aesthetic. Although another quibble, might be the rushed ending as we get a lot of short, rapid fire, chapters, some consisting only of a line or two of text or dialogue.
To sum up, the main characters, the minor characters, the setting, the very world that the women of The House inhabit with all its pressures and contradictions, and all the love/hate interests between the sorority sisters, political machinations, interactions with men of all shapes and varieties, and back-stabbing, do lend themselves to a satirical story. Blake does hit her intended targets many times, but in a knowing, intellectual, wink, wink, “do-you-get-the-in-joke” way. But I would have to say that I found Girl Dinner to be too long, too slow, and not that horrific. Better on the satire front, poorer on the horror one.
Ian Hunter
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