How could you resist a book with the name Bitch Posse? Especially with the dozens of accolades plastered on the back and inside flap.
The premise is good – three women, best friends in high school, who experience a tragedy that tears them apart. They lead separate lives, but must eventually get back together before they can be happy. Who doesn’t have one friend from when they were young that they still miss? Most of the women I know – and many of the men – realize how much emptier their lives would be without a best friend in their life. Humans have a penchant for the What If? game, and many of us know how ugly those other lives might have been without our best friend to help us make the right choices.
Well, I’m sad to say that this is not the book it could have been. What we have are three adult women who are incredibly self-destructive, much like they were as young adults. Yes, they all had crappy parents and terrible childhoods, but none of them seems to have a clue how to be honest with themselves or anyone else. We spend about 165 pages each on the teen years and their adult tragedy, and maybe five pages on them reconnecting and starting to put their lives back together. Ridiculous.
And the worst thing – in my opinion – is that fact that there are dozens of sex scenes in the book, and NOT A SINGLE ONE is healthy or emotionally satisfying for the women involved. Not one. How pathetic is that? Hot, crazy sex – well-written, to be sure! – but it is either statutory rape, drug-enabled, sexual harassment or some other kind of emotionally destructive interaction. It’s disgusting. There is plenty of that kind of sex out there – in real life and in fiction of all kinds – but in a book that pretends to be about the redeeming qualities of friendship, at least some of the sex should be empowering and life-affirming. The one semi-healthy relationship in the book only give us one incidence of that couple having sex – and it is the first time they meet, in the college library without a word exchanged. That is the best this book has to offer.
My bitch posse is a much happier, healthier group to hang with, and anyone who thinks these ladies have it good needs a shrink and a real friend.
I actually agree with your assessment of this book. I was very disappointed when I reached the end. It started out strong, full of posibilities and I kept waiting for the climax (pun intended) but was totally let down.