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In The Angry Wives Club, three women bond at the gym over their shared quiet frustrations: the mental load, the sexual harassment, the lifetime of saying “yes” when they want to say “no”. They start planning a revolution, and so what if they have to commit a few crimes along the way?
My friends at Allen & Unwin were kind enough to send me a copy of this one for review, and I can’t pretend my husband wasn’t a bit concerned to see my nose buried in it.
The story is set in a fictional town on the coast of New South Wales, and that’s not the only part that Stroud has cribbed from Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies. The story is punctuated by brief exchanges or extracts hinting at what’s to come, some kind of Incident involving the three women.
I’ll admit, I found myself a bit baffled by the women in The Angry Wives Club – they all had many justifiable reasons to be angry with the men in their lives and the community at large, but they were all so particularly snarky about other women. They resented younger women for the crime of being young, they envied other women their bodies and faces, even in one memorable (for the wrong reasons) moment, one woman speculates on the tightness (ick) of another woman’s vagina.
As nasty as the women in this book are to one another, the men are worse. There’s really not a single redeemable fellow in the whole cast. Content warnings abound, for domestic violence, sexual assault, and child loss. I’m not sure that mix of serious issues of violence against women with “whacky hijinks” really works in this case.
All that said, The Angry Wives Club does give us one of the best character names I’ve encountered in a while: 72-year-old Joany Maloney (and her husband is Tony). Hats off to Stroud for that, at least!
Read The Angry Wives Club on audiobook via Libro.fm here. (affiliate link)
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