The Page Turners by Mallory Jane Weiss
In a fictitious-kind-of-1844-or-so, Kipper, Mary, Sadie, and Alice are “The Page Turners,” a book club determined to redeem themselves after their disgraceful showing at last year’s Book Club Conference. In part one, “the marriage plot”, the women meet Oliver, a famous, new author, who they hope will give their team a leg-up at next year’s conference. Kipper and Oliver immediately hit it off; wedding plans are...
In a fictitious-kind-of-1844-or-so, Kipper, Mary, Sadie, and Alice are “The Page Turners,” a book club determined to redeem themselves after their disgraceful showing at last year’s Book Club Conference. In part one, “the marriage plot”, the women meet Oliver, a famous, new author, who they hope will give their team a leg-up at next year’s conference. Kipper and Oliver immediately hit it off; wedding plans are soon underway. As Kipper grapples with what marriage will mean for her legacy, her fellow book-club members also struggle with questions of identity. Sadie is adamant that she isn’t sexually repressed (or a lesbian); Alice is being actively haunted by the ghost of her great-grandmother; and Mary is convinced that her husband (on whom she cheated) is having an affair of his own. Part two, “interiority, consciousness, and the first-person narrator,” transitions from matrimony to self. When a new author, Harry, a woman writing under a male pseudonym, enters the scene, everything changes. Suddenly, the women don’t even know what they don’t know. In part three, “modernism: absurd, symbolic, and experimental,” time hurdles rapidly through the final months before the Book Club Conference, as the women attempt to find individual closure before it arrives.
THE PAGE TURNERS explores questions of guilt, motherhood, self, and, of course, propriety in today’s society. It questions how we might shape our identities as women not by society’s rules but rather by the women we surround ourselves with, the choices that we make, and the books that we read.