Olive: The acclaimed debut that’s getting everyone talking from the Sunday Times bestselling author

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DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Andrews McMeel Publishing via Netgalley for providing an audio ARC of Olive by Emma Gannon for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions. The writing felt too casual, too much internet-speak thrown in. The use of "super" as a modifier was overdone and really grating. The protagonist often felt like a conduit for the author's random thoughts that would have been better as tweets. Overall, the writing was poor.

I am almost 33 years old and I am child free by choice. thought I was going to really like this. but I didn't. at all. here are the notes I wrote in my phone as I read this book in one sitting.I found the expression of the various friends' prejudices very interesting. The sub-fertile friend who thinks her suffering must be somehow more noble and worth talking about than her newly single friend's loneliness and sense of loss. The general ganging up of the mums against the non-mum, the sense that Olive's life was somehow less valid and interesting in their eyes, her inability to talk about her broken relationship because her friends were so self-interested. All good valid discussions. suspiciously? As in, they’re fake? And you find it suspicious that she’s … pretending they’re not? Except I think this character is fully aware that her boobs look too perfect to be natural. Isn’t that surely, say, the point of getting a boob job? I dunno, I feel it’s more feminist to just not comment on people’s boobs, suspicious or otherwise. Few novels have attempted to tell us what to do in the face of climate catastrophe. Amitav Ghosh has called this “a crisis of imagination”. As Richard Powers writes in his 2018 novel The Overstory, “The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”

All these books are well argued, emotive and interesting, but it is remarkable how many of these authors suggest that having a child is a hopeful gesture, a sign of one’s investment in the future. Wallace-Wells has said having children “is a reason to fight now”. O’Connell writes that his son’s birth is a dilemma because “the last thing the world needed, after all, was more people in it, and the last thing my hitherto nonexistent person needed was to be in the world”; by the end, he has a second child, and a “radically increased stake in the future”. Klein writes that, before having her son, she “couldn’t help feeling shut out” by activists talking about their children and grandchildren, and wonders: “Was it even possible to be a real environmentalist if you didn’t have kids?” (Yes.) If you don’t, it is seen as fatalism. “Are we then expected to hasten the end, to succumb at last to the logic of oblivion, by renouncing the biological imperative?” asks O’Connell. (No.) When asked why I do not have children, I have given various explanations over the years. 'I don't want to' is the only one that provokes a flinch Olive is a delicate, heartbreaking and delicious story that will bring a pang of delightful recognition to every woman who reads it' Scarlett Curtis Child-free women are often considered unnatural and cold … Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA This is a clever choice by Gannon, immediately upping the stakes and crystallising what Olive stands to lose by not having a child. Her best friends – Bea, Cec and Isla (names, along with Olive herself and her sister Zeta, that collectively make you long for a Mary or a Jane) – are unfortunately too preoccupied with their own dilemmas to support Olive through her crisis. Whilst the style is far too commercial for my tastes, I appreciated the exploration of motherhood in its myriad forms. This book will definitely be discussed by millennial podcasters everywhere (not my scene), which can only be a good thing.

She's a terrible friend - she has zero empathy for the other women (especially Isla, who desperately wants a child through IVF) and constantly feels like she's the one owed an apology. She'd rather feel she's right than make up with her friends - in fact at one point she contemplates walking away from her friends completely. I mean, for what?! What terrible crime have they apparently committed against her? Olive's is not the only perspective to relate to though - each of her friends have a different relationship to motherhood and family - with one friend struggling to conceive through IVF, another with older children but a struggling marriage and a new mother navigating pregnancy and then life with a baby. Empathy is cultivated for each character, poignantly highlighting the struggles that aren't always seen or understood and yet how easy it is to be jealous without knowing this. While the friendships are strong it doesn't shy away from showing how maintaining connection through such huge life changes can be challenging, and the ways we can miss each other when communicating. I loved how this friendship group feel like the heart of the novel too, over any romantic narratives. Please don't hate me for a 3-star. That's easily the highest I've given something in this genre in a long time. Olive is worth a read and could be a good choice for a book club - just don't be surprised if the discussion comes to blows and you end up with prosecco all over the carpet.

There are so many examples of missing commas, which, if you have any sensitivity to how a sentence flows, is incredibly jarring. And it makes the writing read like a high schooler’s first fiction essay. Clive Owen and Claire-Hope Ashitey in Children of Men, the 2006 adaptation of PD James’ novel. Photograph: Allstar/UNIVERSAL/Sportsphoto Ltd. Emma Gannon has written a humorous, searching, thoughtful and honest book about Olive's decision and how it impacts her life, her relationship, her friendships, particularly those with her three best friends: Bea, who has it all - the husband, the house, and 2.4 children (3 actually); Cec, who is pregnant with her first child; and Isla who is struggling with infertility and the impact it's having on her marriage.When I think that it won’t hurt too much, I imagine the children I will not have. Would they be more like me or my partner? Would they have inherited my thatch of hair, our terrible eyesight? Mostly, a child is so abstract to me, living with high rent, student debt, no property and no room, that the absence barely registers. But sometimes I suddenly want a daughter with the same staggering intensity my father felt when he first cradled my tiny body in his big hands. I want to feel that reassuring weight, a reminder of the persistence of life. Thankfully the book isn't just about not wanting kids. It's also about getting them and wondering why you did it; getting them and losing your husband in the process; getting them and realising that maybe your husband wasn't quite so committed, and failing to get them and getting absolutely obsessed about that absence in your life. why do all books written by posh white women mention dinner parties? why have I never come across anyone in my entire life who has been to one? I devoured this warm hug of a book over one weekend. It's a light read yet nuanced too - sensitively exploring a woman's decision to be child-free. Still, my generation continues desperately to hunt for things to do in the face of the greatest catastrophe some of us (or our children) may live to see. We give up meat and take holidays closer to home, even when we know that if the super-rich cut their emissions to that of the average EU citizen, global emissions would drop by a third. But we can’t make anyone else do anything, so we do what we can, and we justify our choices as being meaningful, bigger than us.