dukeofbookingham:

Review | Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

Genre: upmarket, fiction
Setting: USA, 1940s-60s
# of Pages: 496
Rating: 3/5

The skinny: Three young women screw up their lives with money, prescription drugs, and douchebag men.

The fat: This book is the literary equivalent of a bunch of women at a party giving each other The Look when a man in their midst says something sexist or otherwise idiotic. That quality alone–the sheer, tragic familiarity–makes it worth reading, but after two or three hundred pages it does start to feel repetitive. The point is clear from halfway through: being a woman in 20th century America is a little like being engaged in a never-ending all-out war with men, society, and yourself. But the story has staying power, and continues to (perversely) fascinate. What’s shocking now is not Susann’s frank sex talk or her heroines’ unchecked abuse of prescription pills, however. It’s simply how little, in the 50 years since this book’s publication, things have changed.