Reviewed by Kritika Narula
So Thrilled For You
by Holly Bourne
Hodder & Stoughton | Hachette UK
January 2025, Paperback, 432 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1529301656
So Thrilled For You by Holly Bourne revolves around the lives of four women — they call themselves the “Little Women” — who have been friends since college and are now on the threshold of the next phase in their lives. As their lives take definitive turns in different directions — new business, new baby, fertility challenges — their friendship dynamics are being put to the test at a baby shower.
In the background, there’s a brutal heatwave in the UK. There’s Nicki, thoroughly preoccupied with putting up the veneer of a pleasantly heavily pregnant woman. There’s Charlotte, a type A-personality, with more domestic proclivities, who is throwing the baby shower as a gift for Nicki, and as some sort of penance in the aftermath of her struggles with fertility. There’s Lauren, whose introduction to the reader is also interrupted by Woody, her one-year-old’s moods. And finally, Steffi, who has just started her publishing agency in what feels like a milestone achievement to her, but that has gone unnoticed by her friends.
You immediately empathise with each of these characters as you turn the pages to their respective POVs, and that’s precisely the glitter of Bourne’s writing. Her character-driven templates are so watertight, and her characters so realistic that you can even imagine them as real people in your own life.
This novel marks the author’s foray into a newer genre, a challenge she welcomes, as seen in her roster of YA fiction, adult fiction, and now a whodunit-style mystery. And while So Thrilled For You refuses to be boxed, seeing as it is still largely a contemporary fiction and only a mystery-thrilled-adjacent, it’s in the flashforwards to the investigations and the flashbacks to their early days of friendship and romances, that Bourne’s writing shines in its trademark mix of wry humour, urgency, and compelling back stories.
If you’re coming to this book as a longtime reader of Holly Bourne, you’ll recall that the best takeaways from her books are often underlying feminist messages. In this book, she takes an incisive look at the quirks of female friendships. Female friendships are a fertile ground for some of the most extreme human emotions to be studied, so you are in for a mix of envy, rage, anger, sadness, loss, and hurt. What we discover in the pages is an almost poetic exploration of several female friendship dynamics in all permutations among the four friends.
As everyone drives over and adjusts to the baby shower venue in the sweltering heat, sweat seeps through their pores, and along seeps judgment. Upon seeing Lauren in a dishevelled state, Steffi’s mind went, “I hate myself for thinking it, but I think it nonetheless. Wow, she’s really not lost the baby weight. Which shocks me as Woody is, what, almost a year old? And Lauren’s figure has always been so effortlessly amazing.”
Lauren and Nicki are enraged at Steffi sharing her views on dating while wanting to be child-free. Nicki mentally snaps upon noticing Steffi being checked out, “Honestly, why do I bother with her when she insists on being so secretive? She’s probably sending bitchy messages to her other cool London ‘child-free friends’ who liked that horrible opinion article she posted.”
And they are all unanimously judgemental of Charlotte and her controlling tendencies, as she does all the cringe “Instagram clusterfuck of a baby shower” activities, which everyone knows she wanted at her own baby shower: makes elaborate spreadsheets of gifts, forces them to take photos, arranges senseless games, curates a vulva pinata for the party…
And since it’s first-person POV, everyone’s convincingly innocent in their judgements.
If you ask Steffi why she feels invisible and misunderstood, it’s because everyone else recognises and worships specific achievements and milestones.
She thinks to herself:
It’s not that I’m against celebrating pregnancy, or weddings, or hen dos, or all the other parties I’ve dutifully attended–but not particularly enjoyed–since I turned twenty-seven when suddenly these things started demanding most of my weekends. They are beautiful things. Huge, wonderful life moments in my treasured friends’ lives. They were just so generic. So . . . gendered. So utterly lacking in any uniqueness, despite everyone’s best efforts to make theirs different. Hive mind, groupthink, spoon-fed desires. And so, I’ve ended up attending precisely the same wedding multiple times. I could attend a wedding in my sleep, and a baby shower in my nap–they are so paint by numbers.
Me setting up Foxxy Books wasn’t in the same league as getting married or pregnant. When I’m achieving things so beyond possible for most people? When I’m being so brave rather than so generic?
Ask Lauren, who had a traumatic childbirth experience, and whose life has been topsy-turvy since, and she unravels:
Then the baby was plopped on my chest, wrapped in a blanket and hat. It was an ugly disgusting alien and it stared up at me with big black eyes and we were told to all smile for a picture. The nameless lady had Tristan’s phone and we both grinned obligingly. In days to come, we would send this photo to our friends and family, and they would send back heart-eye emojis and congratulations like this photo was taken of a good thing, rather than the worst moment of my life. The first few seconds of this New Me that was forged that day–in blood and sweat and agony and fear.
Charlotte and her husband have been trying to get pregnant but keep getting hit with misfortunes. Nicki is pregnant and unsure about her closest relationships; the whole thing a mess she is still working through untangling. Motherhood is a tapestry of such a complex spectrum of emotions, and Bourne weaves all the colours onto it. Her own experience as a new mother played a part in this plot. The juxtaposition of a new mother with a woman desperate to be a mother is bittersweet. The warnings about sleepless nights are lullabies to her ear.
That’s the biggest headfuck about motherhood–there’s no going back. There’s no trial period or refund with a receipt. You can’t possibly imagine how ridiculously hard it is, and when you do, it’s too late. You can’t go back to before, and, because of the ludicrous love you feel for your life-ruining baby, you wouldn’t want to anyway. Even though you would. But you’d like to keep the baby, too.
With such diverse takes on motherhood, the author ensures that the reader also sees herself in at least one of the characters.
At times, So Thrilled For You feels like a Liane Moriarty book, the unputdownable quality in the mystery around the arson investigations, the morsels on the early days of Little Women’s friendship, and the riptide of a person in the form of Phoebe.
Due to the length of the book (I’m not complaining; the context setting helped us get into the skin of the characters), my perception of the novel was constantly teetering on the edge, questioning whether it would be an anti-climax. And while I was satiated on that end, I felt a certain abruptness in the resolution.
As big a fan as I am of epilogues, the book might have benefitted from taking time to settle down and untie the knots. The Little Women’s mental monologues were scathing, to say the least. These were issues with scar tissues; they ran deep, over a decade, over people. How did the puzzle pieces fall into place so perfectly? How is it that none of them harbours any leftover resentment?
So, what’s the last word on it? Is So Thrilled For You worthwhile? Yes, and if you are contemplating your stance on motherhood or if you are a mother, it will make you feel seen.
About the reviewer: Kritika Narula is a writer, journalist, and content marketer from Delhi, India. She holds a master’s in Media Management from the University of Glasgow and runs a little content agency, KN Content. Her writing has appeared in The Hooghly Review, Usawa Literary Review, Lobster Salad and Champagne Magazine, The AuVert Magazine, Sanity by Tanmoy, among others. You can find her kritika.narula on Instagram and Threads, on >BlueSky, on >Twitter, and her own website!