I’ve been on hiatus for a while since my last post.  But now I’m back and ready to review small content with a big lens.  In this review of an Amazon preview, I am taking a look at Crimes Against a Book Club by Kathy Cooperman.

At the start of our Amazon preview, we are introduced to the fierce members of Annie Baker’s book club, who, like a pack of wolves, must sniff Annie out to see if she belongs.  Horrifyingly, she reveals to the group that she does not do Pilates and isn’t from La Jolla.  Things are not going well, but just when it appears that the pack is going to rip her limbs off and bath in her blood, Anne’s friend Dawn extols Annie’s virtues, including her doctorate in Chemistry from Harvard.  This seems to be enough to sate the group, though no one appears to know what exactly one does with such an education.

We soon find out that almost nobody in the group had read the book, and those who had only vaguely understood it or cared about it.  The book club is a façade, a means to disguise their petty desire to gossip.  And Annie is quite different from these ladies: while Annie gorges on the snack trays, the skinny women in the club seem to pick at their food.

And there is the little matter that one member, Crystal, is pregnant with another member’s ex’s baby (the other member would be Valerie).  Annie can’t figure this out.  It makes no sense.  Dawn is finally pushed into revealing that Dawn’s mother-in-law is besties with the ex (Walter) and Walter complained that nobody was being friendly with Crystal.

There is a sort of strained-melancholy to it all, like we are supposed to be in on some sort of joke with Annie, but the joke just never seems to surface.  Are we supposed to hate these feuding faux-socialites who have nothing in common except a preternatural urge to gather with their kind?  If so, it really seems that instead there is only a meandering pride that at least Annie is not one of these horrible people.  And maybe that’s the point, in her own sort of Holden Caufield-esque paranoia, Annie is able to define herself as at-least-not-phony, and we, the readers, are left to suspect whether what we are told is really true or whether she has painted these people in a poor light to shore-up her own self-doubt.

How it would end if I had written it:

Annie Baker eventually learned to accept the terrible book club members on their own terms and took delight in predicting their horrible reactions to the New York Times’ bestseller list books.  Annie is being infiltrated by the club members’ plastic values.  When all the ladies decide to submit try-out videos for the next season of the Bachelor, she feels like a traitor for not participating.  She knows she’s in trouble when she starts ending her nouns with “-ing” and buys a palette of Kombucha.  She must do something to disrupt the flow of the club or else face becoming permanently assimilated.

That’s when Annie has the dreadful idea of suggesting her childhood favorite, Animal Farm by George Orwell, as the next book in the rotation.  The local thrift store had a dozen second-hand copies.

At first, the other ladies didn’t want to physically touch the dusty and yellowed pages of the used books.  After Annie vouches for the book’s important political message, the club decides to give it a read.  Crystal is drawn in by the archaic drawings of animals on the cover and Dawn is amused to find out there weren’t any actual pictures inside.

Despite the fact that half the club hasn’t read the book, the Animal Farm discussion proves to be the most contentious book club meeting yet.  Crystal doesn’t quite understand why the animals threw away a perfectly good life by overthrowing the kind farmers, but soon enough she is taking a side in the contest between Napoleon and Snowball.  Dawn thinks the windmill just wasn’t built up to spec, and the others aren’t quite sure that the animals don’t all deserve to be taken to the slaughter house after learning about the hideous things these creatures do.

Later, the club falls into a rift when Walter and Crystal break up.  Half the club sees this as an opportunity to kick out their pariah and the other half has learned to love Crystal’s horrible ways.  Oddly, Annie falls in with the latter group and tries to coax Dawn into letting Crystal stay.  But Dawn isn’t having any of that and points out that Crystal was no better than the traitorous cat in Animal Farm, who was found to have voted on both sides.

All of this culminates in one grand statement by Crystal: “Maybe that pig Napoleon was right; some animals are more equal than others, just like people.”  She storms off and the book club soon after dissolves for good.