Mean girls have to grow up sometime, and when they do, they may well end up like the calculating, self-centered, secret-keeping, and extravagantly entertaining mothers of Emma Rosenblum's Mean Moms.
This satirical thriller revolves around Atherton Academy, a top Manhattan private school that seems to bring out bad behavior--not in its students but in their parents. At drop-off on the first day of the new school year, a clutch of moms gossip about a newcomer to the community: Sofia Perez, a divorcée who has recently moved from Miami to New York with her two kids, now Athertonians. After a mom invites Sofia into her friendship cluster, bad things start happening: one mom gets knocked down by a guy on an electric scooter; a man robs everyone at gunpoint at the opening of another mom's "sound bath spa"; and so on. Nothing like this happened before Sofia came on the scene. Surely she's to blame?
Rosenblum (Bad Summer People; Very Bad Company) presents a hilariously and obscenely privileged world--there seems to be a reference to a luxury brand for every punctuation mark. The novel's perspective roves as Atherton's legendary theme parties outdo one another for conspicuous consumption; meanwhile, the narrative slow-builds to the mayhem promised in the prologue. Throughout Mean Moms, readers get the sense that, while the delicious characterizations are heightened--one mom sees Atherton as the "key to the Ivies, which, most annoyingly, you couldn't buy your way into nowadays"--they're not heightened by much. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer