O'Connor, Martha: The Bitch Posse

St. Martin's Press © 2005, 341 pages [amazon]

The three friends who compose the Bitch Posse of Martha O'Connor's title, Rennie, Cherry, and Amy, have flirted with--have wallowed in--pretty much every self-destructive activity you can think of: smoking and drinking, illegal drug use, prescription drug abuse, cutting, indiscriminate sex, violent sex, sex with one of their high school teachers. Each of the girls has some impossibly difficult situation at home that explains her bad behavior and makes her cling all the more to the companionship of the other two. The friendship is all the girls have going for them, but because they reinforce one another's dangerous behaviors their relationship is not necessarily a force for good.

We are made to understand early on in the story that some terrible event occurred--or rather, that the girls were responsible for something terrible happening--at the end of their senior year in high school, in 1988.The three friends are not inherently bad people. With one noteworthy exception they do not abuse anyone other than themselves. Still, they are not the sort of adolescents you'd want your daughters to grow into. They inspire pathos, but are neither admirable nor particularly likeable. It is a testament to Martha O'Connor's storytelling, then, that she can make this account of the girls' transition from unhappy teenagers to miserable adults downright riveting.

We are made to understand early on in the story that some terrible event occurred--or rather, that the girls were responsible for something terrible happening--at the end of their senior year in high school, in 1988. Whatever this event is (we find out only later in the book), it shattered their relationship and informed their subsequent lives, not in a good way: the girls remain in adulthood given to self-destructive, anti-social behavior, at least in part because of what happened in 1988. O'Connor jumps in the telling between the events of that year and the book's dramatic present, fifteen years later, when her characters are still haunted by their adolescence and are still pining for their lost friendship. She tells the girls' story from each of their perspectives, changing point of view from chapter to chapter and jumping also from first- to third-person narrative.

O'Connor's story builds inexorably to a description of the dramatic event that so marked the girls. But in fact it is not so much the terrible thing they did that comes as a surprise, but what they did next, how they responded to the event. That's what makes their actions in the future explicable, and that's what adds complexity to O'Connor's story, making it a natural for discussion groups that are willing to sink their collective teeth into some difficult subject matter. The Bitch Posse is not a light read, but it is certainly gripping, and well worth the read.

Tags: book reviews, books, Martha O'Connor, The Bitch Posse

Comments

[Cherry]

1.

i love this book!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!me and my frends amy and rennie(not our real names but we changed our names because we read the book and started our own bitch posse we even have a pammie mcfade)

[jaime]

2.

omgsh!! best book ever!!