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Girl Dinner

Olivie Blake

Satire
Horror
Contemporary
LGBTQIA+

At a glance

💗
Sorority shenanigans
🙂
Good for her
🗣
Polyvocal narrative
📱
#rushtok

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six, Girl Dinner is a darkly fun novel about power, lust, and eating your fill, as wealthy moms and sorority girls practice a sinister new wellness trend…

Good girls deserve a treat.

Every member of The House, the most exclusive sorority on campus, and all its alumni, are beautiful, high-achieving, and universally 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 easy 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 18 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 paralyzing 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 so 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.

Don’t just take
our word for it

"As always, Blake eats! Girl Dinner is truly brilliant—a precise and ruthless novel about the impossibility of being a woman and a mother, it also answers the question of what it takes to win when you start from a losing position. I savored every morsel of this wickedly fun and deeply satisfying interrogation of sisterhood, sorority life, and the true cost of success."

- Ling Ling Huang, author of Natural Beauty and Immaculate Conception

"At once hilarious, scathing, insightful, and heartbreaking—I devoured Girl Dinner! Olivie Blake never pulls any punches, defies genre boundaries, and this book cements her as one of the most unique voices writing at the moment. I live for her commentary on motherhood, relationships, and above all, academia. This book is the fever dream I never knew I needed, and I’m going to recommend it to everyone I meet!"

- Ali Hazelwood, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Love Hypothesis

"An exploration of the many hungers of the female heart and the pain behind the drive to be everything to everyone, Girl Dinner shaves pearls into teeth and bites deep. As a woman, as a mother, as a wife, as an artist—I felt this story in my bones."

- Delilah S. Dawson, New York Times bestselling author of The Violence

Get a taste

SEVEN WEEKS TO INITIATION.

The clatter of dinner that evening was familiar, monotonous, like the pain in her low back that never really went away. For some months Sloane had also been desperate to become unaware of her perineum. Not even for it to feel normal or even comfortable— that felt too high an ask. To simply forget she had a perineal region would be bliss itself within the context of her daily aspirations. Gradually she had been able to go minutes, then hours, then days and even weeks, and on the whole it felt as if she had impressively willed her way to nirvana. But with the euphoria of forgetting her pelvic floor came the reminder that thirty-three years of bipedalism and gravity could never really be thwarted; that if it wasn’t one thing, it would be another. If it wasn’t the third-degree perineal tear that had taken four months of woo-woo meditation and therapeutic fingering to heal, it was run-of-the-mill mortality—the helpless slip of a vertebral disc. In these moments Sloane became overwhelmed by a rush of disappointment in herself. She was ordinariness incarnate.

Behind her, Isla, apple of her eye, object of a love so richly milk-sweet and cream-fat it sometimes felt erotic, banged on the tray of her high chair, not for the first time that evening and, with the way things were going, also not the last.

Bang. “Max,” said Sloane. Bang bang bang. “Max, she’s trying to get your attention.”

“Hm?” Max looked up from his phone. (His phone! His pressing emails! His fucking emails! His precious fucking news headlines!)

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Book notes

  • 🙋‍♀️ Why we chose

    What, exactly, is a “girl dinner”? There are so many possibilities: a well-curated savory snack plate, a side of both fries and caesar salad served with a diet coke, free muffins from that after-work event you begrudgingly attended. But always, a girl dinner is an act of resistance against the patriarchy—a rejection of the expectation that a woman’s place is in the kitchen.

    Which is why “girl dinner” (both the concept and the Olivie Blake novel) is such a clever metaphor for the fraught nature of feminine desire—the messy space between indulgence and denial, rebellion and conformity. A girl can be both a sorority sister and a revolutionary, a trad wife and a blood-thirsty villain. She can “have it all” while still wanting so much more.

    But it’s unladylike to want more, isn’t it? To want, not a snack, but a full-on feast. Girl Dinner offers a solution to the greatest desire of all: to be the girl who transcends her female-ness entirely, gaining—at last!—the approval of her male peers. But the novel argues: think not about what you can offer men, but rather what they can offer you. If “food is fuel,” then boys are no different—valuable only insofar as their usefulness, their metaphorical (ish?) protein content.

    It’s tough to be a woman under patriarchy. There’s no choice but to live with the tangled contradictions, the fear that no matter how much you do, it’ll never be enough. But as Nina points out, maybe that’s the best we can hope for: “Just filthy compromise and little treats.”

  • ⚠️ Content warnings

    Cannibalism, discussion of sexual assault.