The Reading Group

The Reading Group by Elizabeth Noble talks about, what else, a reading group made up of five women: Harriet, a young married mom who feels she has married the wrong man; Nicole, an unhappily married young mom whose husband routinely cheats on her; Susan, a happily married woman with almost grown sons who has to care for her failing mother; Polly, a single mom who has a 20 year old daughter who just found herself pregnant; and Clare, a married woman who is infertile. The story winds its way through a full year of the book group, with each chapter starting with the book choice of the month. Without giving too much away, each woman has a difficult year, but manages in their own way to come out on top, but not always the way one would expect.

I picked up this book (Kim, is this the one you read?) because I loved Alphabet Weekends and Things I Want My Daughters To Know and wanted to read the author’s first book.

I particularly liked how the author handled the book group meetings—for the actual book discussion part, Noble understood it wasn’t necessary to always follow who was saying each bit—she just let the conversation flow, like a normal book group would do, with women cutting each other off and jumping in with revelations. I really liked that and thought it was totally life like.

In the extras at the end of the book, the author states that the novel is about six women—Harriet, Nicole, Susan, Clare, Polly and Polly’s daughter Cressida. Because of her feelings about Cressida’s pregnancy, Clare drops out of the book group about halfway through the year, and we hear almost nothing from her through the rest of the book. I thought the author should have followed this character a bit longer, instead of having her drop out of the story except to pop back in towards the end. Considering how closely and deeply we follow the other characters, that treatment seems atypical.

I look forward to reading Noble’s second book, The Friendship Test.

K