This book, about five women on a reality tv show called Goal Diggers, is the novel equivalent of exactly that: trashy reality tv that you cannot stop watching.
“The patriarchy survives so long as women are pitted against one another. It is a threat to a man’s way of life when women gather, when they question the status quo, and when they inevitably start to resist it.”
The premise is good: a reality show about extremely successful women, two of whom happen to be sisters. Each woman has her own business, her own drama, and her own secrets. The women are not particularly likable, and that’s good — they don’t need to be liked to be successful. But of course it leads to fights and drama and, eventually, a death.
I actually really enjoyed some of this, and it makes some scathing points about society (“It is a dangerous thing to conflate feminism with liking all women. It limits women to being one thing, likable, when feminism is about allowing women to be all shades of all things”) but it was also kind of a confusing mess. It starts out with an interview in which we discover one of the main characters has died. Then it bounces back and forth between events when she was still alive, leading up to her death, and then back to the interview. We’re supposed to be watching it all unfold, trying to figure out who did it, but there are so many characters and so much moving around in time that I kept getting lost. Without that aspect, if the story had been told just a little more straightforwardly, it would have been one hell of a beach read.