After several best-selling non-fiction books Ctr, Alt, Delete, The Multi-Hyphen Method and The Multi-Hyphen Life, Olive is Gannon’s fiction debut. it was widely known that Charlize's boyfriend, the father of the child, owned a chain of popular hotels in the area and was going to inherit the family business soon..." how can you own something you're going to inherit? it reads so badly and is incredibly distracting!

Her inner monologue, as we never hear from anyone else, is of a pretty dreadful human being. She moans when her friends are late but continually mooches around and turns up 15 minutes late to all of her meetings – including boasting that she’s so good at her job and so senior that she can turn up when she wants and no-one will challenge her.The night ended with loud music and dancing on tables, and the restaurant staff seemed to love it just as much as we did, pouring free shots straight from the bottle into our mouths.” The writing felt too casual, too much internet-speak thrown in. The use of "super" as a modifier was overdone and really grating. The protagonist often felt like a conduit for the author's random thoughts that would have been better as tweets. Overall, the writing was poor. It was interesting to read this straight after Cho Nam-Joo's Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 which explores similar themes within a different cultural context. The novel depicts a Korean woman's life and the resentment and mental distress that can build from a lifetime of small and large oppressions and misogyny. In Olive, instead, we see a lighter and more optimistic take: what's possible when a woman strays from the well-trodden path laid by centuries of women before her.

She's a terrible friend - she has zero empathy for the other women (especially Isla, who desperately wants a child through IVF) and constantly feels like she's the one owed an apology. She'd rather feel she's right than make up with her friends - in fact at one point she contemplates walking away from her friends completely. I mean, for what?! What terrible crime have they apparently committed against her? But even when the future seems like no place for a child, there is always room for them in fiction set at the end of the world: they are emotional ammunition, a reminder of bigger stakes to come. In Lauren Beukes’s upcoming Afterland, a global pandemic that kills only men has lead to a “global reprohibition”; Cole, a mother on the run with her mysteriously still-living teenage son, thinks: “When there aren’t going to be any more kids, you want to hold on to their childhood for as long as you can. There must be a German word for that. Nostalgenfreude. Kindersucht.”

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I am almost 33 years old and I am child free by choice. thought I was going to really like this. but I didn't. at all. here are the notes I wrote in my phone as I read this book in one sitting. I read this book on holiday a few years ago and it made me realise I’d love to write a slightly rough-around-the-edges female character. In this novel, the character Eleanor Mellett is going through a bad break up and trying to rebuild her life post-cancer. The way this book is written in a captivating first person, like a diary, in a sort of Girl On The Train way it kept me completely hooked for days. Eleanor is a dark and funny character—I remember it being described as “Bridget Jones meets The Exorcist” which made me laugh because it sounds bonkers, but it’s actually a really good description. My Dark Vanessa, Kate Elizabeth Russell

Although the audiobook was really engaging and the narrator did a good job, some things stood out, and made me lower my rating and thoughts about the book. Despite this being an underlying theme of the book, it doesn’t just speak to the women who don’t want to have children. Olive is a warm and honest story that has female friendship at its core. It explores the ebb and flow of female friendship as we age and how it evolves when we’re catapulted into making life changing decisions about our careers, motherhood and marriage. Even though I rate it at two stars, I actually enjoyed the book. It did make me examine my thoughts on motherhood and life choices, and helped me understand where I stand. It had a lot of (mostly side) characters telling different stories which I found inspiring. For August’s book club, we had the pleasure of reading Olive, the hotly-anticipated novel by Sunday Times Author, Journalist & Podcaster, Emma Gannon. As a recent mum, phew, a lot of it caught me off guard. There's an almost ingrained guilt to pregnancy and motherhood, and a guilt about not having children, and here it was shown across a wide range of brilliant characters, all dealing with their own twist on the idea.I don't want to forget that we are still young. It's clear that our lives are at a major crossroads. We are no longer sat at the traffic lights, though, everyone is already zooming off in different directions. I wish everyone and everything would slow down just for a moment."