Customer Reviews

The Bitch Posse

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Unfortunately I decided to grab this book on my way out the door headed for a week camping trip. What a mistake! This book was so hard to put down, not something you should leave town with! This is the story of Amy, Cherry, and Rennie (a.k.a. the Bitch Posse).

These three girls were best friends and blood sisters back in 1988, their senior year of high school in Holland, Illinois. The chapters alternate between each girl, and the past and present. In 1988 at the Porter Place (a local hangout for teenagers) a terrible thing happened to separate these three girls forever. The girls of today (2003) have moved on and tried to forget, scattered all over the country, we see how each one turned out after getting glimpses into their wild teenage days.

Rennie's a famous author struggling with drugs, an addiction to sex, and trying to get her second book written, Amy's pregnant with a skeezer of a husband, but is trying with all her might to lead a simple normal life, and Cherry is in a psychiatric hospital, trying to get through each day.

I'm telling you, once you pick this up you will not be able to put it down. Just the suspense of "What happened in 1988 at the Porter Place that so severely messed up these girls and kept them from ever speaking to each other again" will keep you turning the pages. Not recommended for anyone under the age of seventeen, but an entertaining juicy read for the rest of us.

I felt obliged to head over from my comfort zone of Amazon.co.uk and write a review on here, too.

There I was stood in Waterstone's and the title leaped out at me (It's pusblished under "The Bitch Goddess Notebook" in the UK") so I read the abck where people had put comments and one was "this'll haunt you long after you've turned the last page" to which I rolled my eyes because, well, I'm cynical but hey, I like a good challenge (and I have money to waste) so I bought it.

At first I couldn't get into it. The alternating between the past and present irritates the hell out of me (Jodi Picoult's books have me screaming with annoyance but I'm a masochist so I continue to buy them!) but I persevered mainly because it'd cost me a tenner (about $14 for you Americans) and I refuse to give up when I've worked for that money!

As the book proceeded I began to, shock horror, find the past-present endearing rather than irritating, and I fell in love with Rennie, Cherry and Amy probably because I see a bit of each of them in my friends. It's ironic, but this book touched me more than any other chick-lit-happy-ending-we-love-the-world-and-everyone-in-it books because it was so dark. Yes, it's too the extreme but that's OK.

And to the comments that it's a "bad influence" I disagree. I am 17, and I think the majority of readers my age will view as a book and nothing more. Please, give us some credit. As for the ones, that won't and don't, well they're going to be promiscuous, drug users with or without this book if they're that way inclined.

Even months after, I still catch myself thinking about the book. One line.

"You have to hurt to feel anything at all"

That statement, for me, is the one thing that haunts me most about the whole book.

This book, "The Bitch Posse," reminded me a great deal of the movie "Girl Interrupted." Although the author fearlessly warns her story is not "chick lit," I was a bit disappointed with the book, especially considering the glowing reviews that fill the book jacket. Maybe this is just a book for women of an age that I have passed through long ago, but I did not find the story that holds these three women together compelling. Each woman (Cherry, Amy, and Rennie) is driven by demons and an unhappy childhood to become a "wild child," but this fearsome approach to life only means lives of desperation later on. Their connection, a friendship in high school, crumbles as surely as their demons take over their adult lives, tearing them apart.

Despite their shared friendship, it is a terrible event which holds them together long after the glue of friendship has evaporated. One has a loveless marriage, one is in a psychiatric hospital, and the narrator (a writer) goes from one man and one bottle to the next. When they finally come together, the event at the center seems to collapse in on them, leaving the reader with a story, but not much of a reason to care about their self-destructive tendencies.

The individuals are probably more interesting independent of the friendships that tie this storyline together. Although the novel was easy reading, but I just left the book feeling unsatisfied with the conclusion. The storyline that involves the writer, Rennie, was probably most interesting (and no doubt probably the most autobiographical). If you are in your 20s and a woman, you might enjoy this book. For everyone else, I'd give it a pass.

oh my gosh, but this book was raw and intense! this book just left me shaking my head for hours on end after i had finished it. it is the tale of three troubled girls with a horrible incident in their past.

however, the bitch posse is a book that is not for everyone. you can see here, the book was responded to quite positively by some, and others simply despised it. so what i would say to someone considering purchasing or borrowing this book, is this:

1) if you are looking for a raw, emotional book that explores deep and disturbing issues of addiction, self injury, sexual deviation and violence (some of us do like this sort of thing... call me twisted if you like) then try this one out.

2) if you are upset by this type of material, or find it unrealistic (maybe you grew up in june cleaver's home), then please don't read it. it will just frustrate you. give it to your little sister who's in recovery or something. this is one of those books you either get it or you don't.

if you like:
stephen elliott, joyce carole oates, craig clevenger or mary gaitskill--- you may like this one.

if you like:
danielle steele, nora roberts, long boring so called 'literary' books that don't go anywhere--maybe you won't like this one so much.

that's my advice! personally i really liked it and so did my two best friends from high school! (we were kind of a bitch posse ourselves. but then, none of us were ever pom-pom girls, student council reps, or sports figures! we were your typical miscast misfits. so sue us!)

I just loved this book. It managed to be a page-turner, while still being a wonderful character study of some very troubled people. It's about three girls who are very dysfunctional in high school and get mixed up in a dark and violent event.

Some reviewers complained about the book being dark. The darkness of the book is what makes it work, in my opinion. And call me crazy, but I could definitely see a gleam of hope at the end. Yes, there are young girls like these characters (I teach some of them) and it would behoove all of us adults with whom they're in contact to read a book like this.

Another book that might be on the same topic is PREP, but to me this book moved much more quickly. It also could lend itself to some really fascinating discussions about the ethics of friendship.

In all honesty, I couldn't assign this in my class due to the subject matter (I know my students would love it though), but I think it is a great book for adults and teens to read together, so the heavier and more disturbing topics can be discussed.

In closing, this was one of my favorite books of the summer along with EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE, THE WHORES ON THE HILL, and THE KITE RUNNER.

Throughout this novel, Martha O'Connor manages to keep the reader interested a mystery event at the end of senior year that wound three high school girls together forever. She doesn't reveal the secret until the end of the book, but the journey is well worth it and the suspense isn't overdone.

This book tries to hit home on the theme of friendship, but O'Connor misses the boat a bit there. Her high school girls are caricatures of themselves, and they aren't totally believable (since when does a cheerleader up and shred her uniform one day so she can hang out with a druggie crowd instead?). They claim to have this everlasting "bitch posse" bond, but their bond of friendship isn't about being friends, it's about bitching about the world, lying to their parents, and doing drugs and alcohol. I didn't really see a touching friendship in here, just some aimless girls. Go read a Francesca Lia Block book if you want to be overwhelmed by girlhood friendships and finding your place with the misfits of the world.

The girls face some truly dreadful adults in their lives, in the form of their parents and teachers. They are right to be angry at the world about how they are treated, but I was upset that they took all their anger on adults as a whole out on one person, instead of working together to change their lives.

The book is told from altnerating viewpoints of the three girls at age 18 and at age 30. The style works and the story unfolds to shape these three women well. Unfortunately, O'Connor gets more involved in the 18-year old story (which is the one which ends with the big suspense event), and the book ends on that note, with no resolution to what these women are doing in their 30's. I was left feeling kind of empty about what happened to these women a decade after the big suspense event.

I'm not sure who the audience for this book is. It had a catchy enough description that I (mid-20's) read it along with my college freshman sister, and we both appreciated it. It's ostensibly a story about high schoolers, but I'm not sure all the themes and language and drug use are going to be well received by high school librarians. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone younger than college-age myself.

For me, the title of this book suggested a light-hearted fun read. However, The Bitch Posse is so much more. The reader is instantly pulled into the turbulent teenage lives of high school seniors: Amy, Cherry, and Rennie. Each girl is coping with family life issues that one would hope an average teen would never have to deal with. It's a raw and gritty coming of age tale.

There's a lot to make you grimace while reading this book. For example, there's a scene where the threesome pledge their allegiance to the friendship by cutting their arms and drawing blood and then mixing the blood in a jar.

A dreadful event and secret shatters the friendship. The reader is taken on a journey that goes back and forth from the self-proclaimed Bitch Posse's senior year in high school until the young women are in their thirties. There's no fairy tale ending in this book. It's all raw, in your face, and real. I loved it.

I did not want to put this book down! Each character was fun and interesting to read about. I would love to read more books like this!

If Joyce Carol Oates and Chuck Palahniuk collaborated, the result might read a lot like O'Connor's incendiary debut. The story of three brilliant but troubled high school girls who use one another as shelter from parental neglect, the banality of youth, and dangerous forays into sex and substances, THE BITCH POSSE walks lonely, lost territory without descending into melodrama. Mostly this is due to some mighty impressive writing -- intimate, conversational, and raw, the prose weaves a dark spell that makes it easy to lose hours and come out blinking.

One of the parts I found most interesting was that the sex scenes are, frankly, hot, and yet so very wrong. It's like the video for Fiona Apple's "Criminal", where's Apple is anorexic, exposed, and vulnerable, squirming through squalor, and you realize she's at once turning you on and commenting on how wrong it is for you to be turned on. It takes a serious artist to evoke that conflict, and Martha O'Connor nails it.

This book made my skin crawl, my spine tingle, and most importantly - my heart break. Marth O'Connors debut into the literary world is a well-paced, interwoven story of three young women at two points in their life, shortly before graduating high school, and some tweleve years later as adults, no longer friends, but bound and tormented by a secret held between them all.

Each character is written with a lot of heart and empathy from O'Connor - there is a reason why the girls get into the trouble that they do. Rennie (Wren) Taylor is an honour student wanting to break out of her shell, and later on, a single teacher caught up in a dangerous pattern of sexual depravity. Cherry lives with her drug-addled mom and is forced to be both the adult and the best friend, and eventually she ends up in a mental institution, unsure of whether she belongs there. Amy Linnet is Little Miss Popular who breaks free from her life as a cheerleader to escape from the facade her alcoholic parents put on, ironically later on she is the one putting on the same facade in her troubled marriage.

The book follows an interesting pattern of narrative that rotates between the characters, the time period, and the point of view. Rennie might kick off the book in the present tense using third-person narrative, but the next section Cherry might jump in as a troubled high school senior writing in first person, followed by Amy as an adult in third person and so on...instead of creating a jarring effect, the swapping narratives helps contextualize the two periods of time in the girls lives. There is a certain amount of naivete that comes through in the first-person teenage viewpoint, and a certain amount of wiseness in the third person.

I can't reveal too much about the plot other than to say these girls are hitting hard stages in their lives at both ends of the spectrum - as teenagers and as adults. Each section offers a delicious climax that invites you to read on, to find out what will happen to each girl within each time period in their lives, but also to fill in the puzzle pieces about their deep, dark shared secret.

That's not to say the book is perfect. Quite frankly I'm afraid of Martha O'Connor. I felt like the prose and the characters were directly derived from her own opinions, that she felt as though everyone that reads the book would judge it like the characters in the book are judged. I also didn't care much for the character of Cherry - until the big secret is revealed. She is underwritten emotionally and there is a few disconnects in her plot line, again until you find out what the big secret is - however by the time you find out what the secret is, the book abruptly (and understandably) ends, leaving the reading to fill in the pieces.

Overall I enjoyed this book. I was a bit put off by the first couple of chapters, and I'd definitely say heed the opening warnings about how dark the story is - but if you're willing to keep an open mind and just enjoy some excellent, heartfelt, entrancing writing then you'll like this book.