Nom de Plume

One of my free Barnes & Noble books from the $25 dollar gift certificate. Martha has a miserable job as a fact checker for a women’s magazine, a series of hypercritical boyfriends, and a crippling self-esteem problem. While staying with her best friend’s parents on Fire Island, she stumbles into a group of goddess worshippers communing on the beach—and gets sucked into the community when she saves the leader from drowning. Throughout the book, Martha is involved with the rituals–Talking sticks, sweat lodges, man-bashing gatherings–but keeps a watchful eye on her own involvement. She wants the peace she thinks these women have, but knows deep down that they are just as petty and jealous as anyone else.

There were parts of this novel that had me laughing out loud: Prose wickedly satirizes the rituals, the goddess worship speak, the ubiquitous man-bashing. But there’s something liberating in Martha’s journey into and out of this feminist-on-steroids group. Good insight into the relationships women have with each other, the reader really gets a keen sense of Martha’s self-hatred in the beginning. Recommend.