The Bitch Goddess Notebook
by Martha O'Connor
Orion $165
Imagine Charlie's Angels gone bad and you have the Bitch Posse, three tough chicks who 'find trouble before it finds you'. Rennie, Amy and Cherry are seniors at Holland High School in 1988, a year that forever changes their lives and shatters their pact to be 'best friends forever'. Rennie, the smart, sexy one, loses her virginity to Mr Schafer, the married drama teacher. The affair inevitably sours when she falls pregnant, although the ultimate consequence of their liaison is darker. The destructive behaviour of the girls - self-mutilation, drugs, violent sex - follows them into adulthood. Fifteen years later, Rennie is an aspiring writer and cocaine-snorting sex addict who seduces her students, Cherry is in a psychiatric hospital and Amy is in a dissolving marriage, and pregnant. O'Connor flips back and forth in time, naming each chapter after one of the three main characters and inserting the year and location for easy navigation. Punchy, and packed with profanity, her writing will find an appreciative audience in readers who can't quite get off on chick lit. The Bitch Goddess Notebook is something to feast on, finish and then forget.