Rating: WARTY!
I thought this might be interesting, but the main female character was so pathetic that I couldn't stand to read more than the first few chapters. It occurred to me that the title had a space too many, and should instead have been "Goon Girl"....
Sydney Clayton (and I can't for the life of me decide if that's supposed to hark back somehow to Sidney Carton of A Tale of Two Cities) is supposed to be a big and powerful executive in a corporation, but her character shows none of this, and she allows herself to be manipulated and used by the elitist women who live in the neighborhood as she tries to navigate her business life, her lackadaisical, cardboard-thin, and apparently useless husband, and her young child's schooling.
This book could have been a great story about how a caring and loving mother taught her daughter to be a strong and independent woman, but instead it takes the road most traveled and depicts her as allowing herself to be blackmailed into doing what these people want - otherwise her daughter will be punished with ostracism at school. Sydney was shamefully spineless, and completely betrayed her daughter. This was entirely out of character! How did a purportedly strong businesswoman get manipulated like this? It made no sense, was boring and poorly-written.
For example, I read at one point: "Last week, I was in the supermarket, and the woman in front of me at the deli counter had the same melody on her phone I used to." My first question immediately after reading that was "Used to...do what?" I had to read it twice more before it made sense and even than it was poorly written, and I'm not talking about ending a sentence with a preposition. I don't care about that. I'm talking about it being unclear and read one way it could be understood that this woman now owns the phone the speaker owned, or maybe should it have ended with 'too' instead of 'to'?! Oh no, I ended a sentence with 'to'! Seriously, it could have been written better and was emblematic of much of this book (at least the bit I read).
The clueless (as usual) blurb rambles, "As Sydney focuses on what is best for her daughter...." but she never does. How a female author can betray her gender like this, not only in how she depicts the mother, but in how she talks about the daughter (who really isn't allowed a voice), I can't understand. And the book assumes these children are mere robots, sent out into the world by their moms, and programmed to do whatever their moms want, like they have no independent thought or even minds at all. I can't commend this garbage.
