Writing team Lisa Blundell and Michelle Harmer (known as Cate Kendall) have drawn on their own experience as private school mums to create the storyline for Gucci Mamas, which is set among a mothers group from Melbourne’s most elite private school. The story begins as lead character Mim rushes to buy mascara during the school run, worried about her reputation should she turn up to drop the kids off not in full make-up. Repeated stories of this type of absurd competitiveness occur for three quarters of the novel and we inevitably start to witness cracks in the surface of the luxurious lifestyles portrayed. Peppered with all the clichés of the genre; labels, workaholic husbands, labels, spoilt out-of-control children and even more labels, Gucci Mamas lacks the heart and the irony of the better works within the ‘mom-lit’(aka hen-lit) genre. These books usually move beyond just describing the out-of-touch lifestyles depicted to actually critique and question the values associated with them, (see, for example, The Nanny Diaries.) It is only in the final couple of chapters that sympathy and empathy for any of the Gucci Mamas emerges-too late for this reader.

Rachel Wilson is an academic and bookseller at the Sun Bookshop in Yarraville, Melbourne

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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