Joanna, do you mind if I call you Joanna?, has attempted this. However, before I attempt to wittily describe how Joanna has missed the point, I must applaud her on her aim – Friday Nights is a novel about women’s experiences. Original, no? Experiences that range from young adult to the somewhat elderly. This is possibly a very difficult undertaking; these women are vastly different not only in age but in values, motivations, careers, family situations and outlooks. That, in itself, is a good idea for a story – women of all persuasions coming together in friendship and bonding as unified women – sweet. But the difference I found ridiculously irritating was the fact that the whole story revolves around the involvement of one man. I don’t know if I was just in a ridiculously self-righteous mood when I read it, but the book is essentially about how a male can cause enormous rifts in a group of friends and then ultimately change all their lives for the better. Dude, guys rock, clearly.

Friday Nights is written with contemporary ease using the appropriate metaphors to relate to its assumedly female audience. The language is simple and easy to understand. Trollope has the genre and the medium down pat, but in all honesty the book was exceedingly dull. The okay so I’ll watch Neighbours while I wait for dinner kind of dull. Now I absolutely adore female fiction – Marian Keyes, Monica Miccinery, they’re fabulous – but I find that even though these stories are also carbon copies of one another there is always something racy and delicious about them. Friday Nights has neither of these things, everything is stoic. Delightfully, we sneak looks through heavy curtains into the intimate lives of these women, but once we peer through we realise they may as well have kept their curtains open in the first place. There ain’t nothing Desperate Housewifey happening in there. One could argue that female fiction has seen enough affairs and sex and needs to focus more on actual values like the family and bonding friendship, the people who argue this should read Friday Nights. Yes it does have a little bit of everything, but only a hint of everything. There’s a smudge of sex in some places, there are biro-scribbles of affairs in others, some of the characters have children and we get to see some parental issues but really, utterly and truly nothing really happens. Nothing really interesting.

Eleanor is an older woman living on her own after a power-suited career. She decides that she needs to interact and befriends two lonely young mothers and the ‘Friday nights’ begin and each mother brings a friend or a sister along. Each woman has a different job and family situation and the reader is granted access to snippets of each of their lives. Then Paula, one of the young mothers, finds a man and the whole meaning to the Friday nights shifts. This man causes all the women (excepting Eleanor, a character I quite enjoyed – possibly for that exact reason) to re-evaluate their relationships, their lives, their jobs and the worrrrrld!

In all honesty I find it difficult to see how this guy could have had that much of an impact, to me he seemed quite nice and amicable. Everyone else just got jealous, not a LET’S PUT THE STUFF THAT STOPS YOU BITING YOUR NAILS ON HER TOOTHBRUSH HAHA sort of jealous, it was a more ‘Hmmm, Paula seems perkier. I wonder if…nah. Well, I wouldn’t mind having sex once in a while…but…nah. I think I’ll move out of the country.” I guess the main issue I had with Friday Nights was that there was nothing new. There was no OMG WAIT WHAT moment, it wasn’t particularly funny and it was all rather ‘Joanna Trollope is fulfilling her book contract’. Anyway, read it if you want to. It takes about a day to polish off and at the end you’ll feel as if you spent all morning preparing yourself a gorgeous lunch and you realise all you actually have is an average peanut butter sandwich.

Image courtesy of Allen and Unwin.