Book Review: BARBARIANS AT THE PTA

Title: Barbarians at the PTA
Author: Stephanie Newman
Publisher: Skyhorse
Pages: 288
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐

Victoria Bryant, a psychologist and single mother to 10-year-old Rachel, decides to move to another town after she finds evidence of her fiance’s sexual indiscretions and calls off the wedding moments before she is about get married. She hopes the new place will help her to forget him and start afresh.

But the fresh start turns out to be a challenge. Rachel’s school is a minefield, with certain moms in the PTA acting vicious towards Rachel. As the other kids mistreat Rachel and their moms, chiefly, the queen bee, Lee, make snide remarks against her, Victoria finds that it is much harder to solve her own problems.

The premise of this book wasn’t new and I kept hoping for a good plot twist or the writing to make it worth my while. But that didn’t happen. The issue of bullying and intimidation at school by children, even by their mothers, has been written far more effectively.

I didn’t warm up to any of the characters. They were all flat and uninspiring. Victoria herself was very boring, and Jim, her love interest, for all her gushing about his physical attributes, was insipid. The romance took up too much space. 

I found it odd that Victoria was so eager to jump into bed, given her history with her fiancé.

Between the mothers, their daughters, and in some cases, the fathers, there were far too many characters in this book. Apparently the profusion also confused the author, because she kept qualifying Katie as Audrey’s kid, Lexi as Jess’ kid etc.

The chapter ending aspired to do some foreshadowing but ended up being banal.

The so-called barbarians were rather unintimidating. Even the word, Barbarian, sounded like an exaggeration. The viciousness was largely restricted to exclusion. Given that bullying in most books covers far deadlier pranks, this one, with nothing more than being left out of party lists, and sitting alone in the dining hall, and even the planting of a vaping device, seemed like much ado about nothing.

Each time the kids are nasty to Rachel, she reacts in the same way. It was only at the 56 percent mark that Victoria did something that might have propelled the action forward. But she didn’t act on it at all.

The ending was the only lively part of the book, but even that fizzled out soon enough.

There were some typographical errors too. Victoria tells Rachel that she has invited Jim over on Friday. A paragraph later, she says, “Before I knew what hit me, it was Saturday.” -- the day Jim turns up. Many paragraphs later, we come to the next morning which is, once again, is Saturday.

The book seemed extremely long, thanks to the non-stop thrashing over the same issues without any resolution. For much of the time, we don’t get a sense of anything happening. I was surprised to see that it was only 288 pages.

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)