My Brilliant Friend

I'm glad I read this with my awesome lady bookclub so we could get together and all be like “...oh good we ALL thought this was kind of overrated, whew”.

IDK, it was fine? I do like the importance of the girl friendship at the center, and the obsessive/competitive/consuming nature of that I thought was well done. And there was a sort of satisfying, Little House on the Prairie-ish satisfaction to just the kind of detailed monotony of household doings and routines?

Also one intrepid member of our book club read Wikipedia summaries of all the other books and told us what happens to all the other characters, which was sort of interesting. Seems like this book is setup/backstory for the series and more things happen later? But ultimately I'm not invested enough to read any more of these books.

I wonder if some of why this is getting attention because it's relatively rare for ~literary fiction~ to be about female friendship and it's refreshing in that way? But I read so much YA fiction about girl friendship that I'm like, okay what else?