But just as she’s preparing to embrace this opportunity, Renata disappears, leaving Dani to step into another role entirely – detective. An exhilarating ride of a novel that deliciously and irreverently skewers the complacent, the entitled and the self-satisfied. You'll lose count of the number of things you learn about women and their skewed place in history as you read Philippa Gregory's stunning Normal Women . It's not our world, but it's a fascinating one, rendered all the more interesting by the unreliability of Dani as narrator. Thirty-five-year-old Dani has given up condo life in the city to move back to her hometown Metcalf with her husband, Clark, and baby daughter, Lotte.

Having finished the book I can see that Hogarth was trying to go for a conspiracy, mystery, inside-job sort of vibe but it was poorly done and really failed to capture my attention. Though I recognize I won’t ever be able to relate to motherhood nor the unequal social pressures women face, the depiction of both motherhood and sex work in this felt at times to be a bit of a mockery rather than satire. You include all these snarky little asides, all this deliciously toxic passive aggressiveness about how men think they’re helping when they’re really not, and how they’re emotionally stunted, and how they can be manipulated, but with these brilliant little glimmers of they’re trying their best in a rigged system AND you couple that with commentary about how being a woman is an endless contradiction, but no matter what you choose to do you're doing it wrong in society’s eyes. In Normal Women by Ainslie Hogarth, new mother Dani is haunted by her family’s legacy, the thought of losing her husband and all the horrors of wifeluencers. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.The book delves very little into some of the broader discourse at play here (like gentrification, sexism and capitalism), but the dark humour ultimately didn’t land for me. But by spotlighting women’s presence, in the shadows of men’s history, it puts women where they belong – centre stage. I can see what Hogarth was trying to do by bringing in the 'cult' element, and having that as a contrast to Dani's mundane interactions with her fellow mum friends, but I felt as though its potential got lost once the book became more of a mystery than a commentary of maternity in society, and I just wasn't as interested in it from there. They committed crimes, or treason, worshipped many gods, cooked and nursed, invented things and rioted.

This haunting is deliberate, unsettling, and reads like the sensation you get after licking a battery—sharp and bitter but intriguing. The novel focuses on Dani navigating the tribulations of motherhood and the social pressures of parenting, marriage and inequities in the roles of motherhood versus fatherhood.These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from reading Philippa Gregory’s Normal Women. In this episode we hear about the anti slavery campaigners - and Philippa introduces us to the hundreds of women who absolutely, under no circumstances wanted the vote. But I was surprised to find no mention of Mary Wollstonecraft, an important pioneer of women's rights. It’s about the mc being shit faced drunk on tequila as her initiation into sex work, which to be clear, she does zero of this entire book.

If you’re tired of British history written by men, about men, then Philippa Gregory has the book for you. Voices of the past can be heard through careful analysis of the fragments that do exist, and reading a document 'against the grain” - of its author’s intention often reveals crucial details.Motherthing is one of my top reads of the year, and I knew how much I adored Ainslie Hogarth's writing and plot formation. We'll hear about rioting women, power-mad women, manipulative women, angelic women and cursed women as Philippa Gregory weaves together narrative history with lively discussions, bringing together historians who are experts in their field, and guests with lived experience and their own modern perspectives to discuss themes from the her book 'Normal Women - 900 Years of Making History'. The voices and stories of women often ignored by historians are included here, including the stories of Black, lesbian and genderqueer women, (please note some historical terms are mentioned here which might upset some, particularly in historical quotations). Like Mona Awad’s Bunny or Otessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, Motherthing is a fabulous, frightening story built from fine, fine prose. I loved Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth and so I was I incredibly excited for her next novel (thank you Atlantic Books for an early copy).