Supper Club

Starred review from May 6, 2019
Williams’s first novel (after the collection A Selfie As Big As the Ritz) is the engrossing, rollicking tale of Roberta, an overweight British woman in her late 20s with low self-esteem and a penchant for cooking. Roberta’s reticence among her peers makes her university time lonely and depressing. She later finds a mundane job at a fashion website where she meets Stevie, a young artist. The women become inseparable and dream up the idea of an underground supper club in which women indulge in appetites they had previously repressed or extinguished. Each dinner has a different theme (literary heroines, princesses) and different food that Roberta prepares; there are also drugs and the night usually ends with the women eating and drinking so much they throw up. The club becomes increasingly rebellious and locates new spaces for the meals, breaking into a department store and Roberta’s alma mater. As Roberta bonds with her clubmembers, she becomes involved with a former school acquaintance and her commitment to the club changes. Williams’s humorous and candid exploration of a woman on the verge of finding herself makes for an enthralling novel.

June 7, 2019

Roberta has been stuck in a rut for most of her life. Nearly 30, she has a dead-end job, few friends, and no social life, fading into the background whenever she can. Her only passion is food and cooking, but she minimizes that, fearing how she'd appear as a woman who embraces her appetite. Then she meets free-spirited artist Stevie, and they invent Supper Club--a group of women disappointed by life who come together to embrace, rather than hide, their hungers and fears. They break into buildings, eat to excess, accept their changing bodies, and reclaim their space in the world. Yet as the club expands its rebellion, Roberta must choose between the "normal" life she's carved out for herself or the freedom she's found in Supper Club, while reconciling with the past she's worked so hard to repress. VERDICT Williams's first novel (after the short story collection A Selfie as Big as the Ritz) delivers a poignant tale of a woman finding her place in the world as she approaches the big three-oh. An homage to female rage and the bonds of friendship, this will entice readers like a gourmet feast and leave them just as satisfied.--Elisabeth Clark, West Florida P.L., Pensacola

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2019
Two young women launch a supper club that lets its female-only members embrace their appetites in British writer Williams' (A Selfie as Big as the Ritz, 2017) delicious first novel. Before Roberta meets Stevie, she is disconnected, depressed, a person to whom life mostly happens, and not always in a good way. Having left the cozy home she shared with her mother for an urban university, she is disappointed to find herself not joyously liberated, as she had imagined she would be, but emotionally confined and isolated from her peers. To kill time, satisfy a hunger for comfort, and buffer herself from academic life and social interactions, she takes up cooking, spending hours in the kitchen of her shared flat conjuring increasingly elaborate dishes and then eagerly devouring them. Roberta lives furtively, apologetically, in time moving on to a generally solitary job at a fashion website. It is there she first encounters Stevie, an aspiring artist who is as free-spirited as Roberta is inhibited, and with whom she forms an immediate bond. "I liked Stevie so much I felt embarrassed....It was like falling in love," Roberta muses as their friendship deepens, quickly transitioning into a roommate relationship with a distinctly "matrimonial dynamic," with Roberta delighting in cooking for someone she cares about. Not long into their head-over-heels friendship, the young women hatch an idea that combines Roberta's knack for cooking and Stevie's artistic sensibilities and skill for forging social connections: They will form "Supper Club," an initiative to intermittently bring together women in a bacchanalian celebration of appetite--for food, for connection, for breaking boundaries and occupying space and approaching life on their own terms, without asking permission or offering apology. Eventually, however, in the midst of these energetic enactments of emancipation, Roberta is compelled to confront and contend with the difficulties in her past--especially those related to men who have disappointed and degraded her--and decide where, for what, and with whom she stands. Mixing together insights about food and friendship, hunger and happiness, and the space women allot themselves in the world today, Williams writes with warmth, wit, and wisdom, serving up distinctive characters and a delectably unusual story. Williams' debut novel will satisfy your craving for terrific writing and leave you hungry for more from this talented writer.

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June 1, 2019
When Roberta's best friend and roommate Stevie suggests they parlay Roberta's considerable cooking talents to hosting women-only dinner parties, it just makes sense: "what could violate social convention more than women coming together to indulge their hunger and take up space?" They dumpster-dive for ingredients, rent out a shuttered restaurant, and let the orgiastic meals unfold. Word-of-mouth spreads, their ranks grow, the drugs flow, and the venues get less legal. The wild, late-night feasts punctuate Roberta's self-reckoning on the precipice of 30, as she recalls being both acutely and profoundly victimized by men during her college years. When a friend from back then becomes her first real boyfriend, Roberta is caught between two free-for-alls?love and marriage with Adnan, female liberation forever with Stevie?and is feeling anything but free. English author Williams' U.S. debut story collection, A Selfie as Big as the Ritz (2017), introduced a keen chronicler of contemporary women's lives; her sly, perceptive first novel does it one better, and offers food for thought on the sorts of love (and sorts of women) that society doesn't accommodate.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)