After reading “Women don’t owe you pretty” and being quite impressed by the initial sheen of Florence’s feminism, I had decent hopes for her first novel, Girl Crush. When I first started to notice her on Instagram during the pandemic, I was impressed by Florence Given, who on the surface appeared fresh and just what women needed. I even ignored a lot of the social media drama about the author being pretty much nothing but a privileged fake, and was intrigued to see how this “bisexual Jekyll and Hyde” would work out. Spoiler- for me, it didn’t work. At all!
The book is about a young woman, Eartha, who embarks upon her sexual journey and coming out after dumping her long term boyfriend. Fine, all was well. Then it just gets weird… Given loses plot threads left, right and centre. She’s tried to write a dystopian attack on social media and the patriarchy (who knows if this is semi-autobiographical- it is self-indulgent enough in places to be so). Girl Crush is trying to be too many things at once, too many metaphors. It’s glib, boring and struggling to figure out what it wants to be.
The ending was haphazard and rushed- it felt like Given needed to get it finished before her Uber arrived or something. It wasn’t bad enough to end up on my DNF list, but I wouldn’t waste your money on it if I were you. ⭐️⭐️ from me, purely because I felt the #lgbtq aspect and the coming out plot points were fairly well done.
