The Pissed-Off Parents Club

by Mink Elliott

[Leah]

Mink Elliott’s debut novel came out at the beginning of 2010 but when I received a copy of The Pi**ed-Off Parents Club, it went straight on my shelf. Mainly because I’m not a big fan of tales about mothers. Not least ones where the mother is unhappy with her baby/her life/her boyfriend because since I’m not a mother I find it whiney and annoying rather than being able to connect with the mothers in question. However, there’s a sequel coming out in January next year so I decided to give it a read because it looked as if it wasn’t a normal mummy tale where Roxy was sick of her baby/life/boyfriend. Well, I thought it wasn’t… Turns out, I was wrong. Very wrong.

Unfortunately for me The Pi**ed-Off Parents Club is exactly everything I don’t like in a tale about motherhood. What I don’t like most of all is how the new mother’s like Roxy think that their baby, their boyfriend, their new house in the sticks, all happened without her knowledge. I mean, my God. Roxy’s baby, Joey, didn’t just appear. Roxy got pregnant. Jack didn’t just magic out of nowhere, she chose him. Her move to the country wasn’t with a gun to her head, she agrees. Yet Roxy spends the entire novel complaining how fat her baby is, how annoying Jack is, and how horrible it is in the country. This is someone who is almost 40-years-old and yet all she does is whine, whine, whine, whine, whine. She’s never happy. She doesn’t like her baby, Joey; she doesn’t like Jack because (gasp!) he’s trying to make money to keep them going; she doesn’t like the building site her house is… It’s all just so darn terrible for her! (I don’t know how she survived, truly I don’t.)

I don’t know why every mother story has to be so hateful. Are there no mothers who, after having a baby and moving to the country, are actually happy? Is that just not possible? Must they all be miserable saps who spend their time whinging and moaning? I mean, it’s not a glowing recommendation for motherhood. It makes you fat, your baby won’t like you, you’ll snap at everyone, you’ll be just a miserable cow, basically. It makes you wonder why anybody bothers procreating. Why don’t we just let the world die out? I could even have enjoyed the novel if it wasn’t something I’d read before so many times. Not even the pi**ed-off parents club could lift the novel out of the doom and gloom it was mired in. That should have been its selling point. That was its unique thing that could set it apart… Except for the fact they all sat there drinking too much, smoking too much and, surprise surprise, complaining too much. There was never any respite from the complaining and it was too much for me.

I’m obviously not the target market for this novel. But it shouldn’t really matter whether I have a baby or not. The point of fiction, of writing a story, of writing Chick Lit, is that anybody can enjoy it. Single females, married females, younger females like me… But books like this one really do pigeon-hole itself where only the miserable mothers can enjoy it. It may as well come with a label that says, “If you don’t have kids, you won’t understand.” Because I didn’t understand. I mean, Roxy’s life wasn’t that hard. She wasn’t depressed, she had a lovely enough boyfriend, she had her baby, she had friends… She just wasn’t interested. I couldn’t get past the fact she said out loud that her baby needs to lose weight. That she constantly called her baby “heavy” and implied Joey was fat. She just wasn’t likeable. I didn’t want to root for her. I wanted Jack to tell her where to stick herself. So, no, the book didn’t work for me. Will I try the sequel? Probably not. The ending of this one was just plain ridiculous that a second book would be much of the same, really. This is definitely a niche novel and that niche is people with babies.