Book Review: "Women on Top" by Michelle Miller

“Women on Top” gives you the idea that you’re going to read about women that create paths for others to follow or to influence people in some way.

The title fools you as well as the book cover.

Reading about women that enjoy their femininity, their works, their sex life is perfectly fine, the problem is that this book is about spoiled women that have a lot of privileges in their lives (I know they’re people that have good luck and that can have extraordinary experiences, that’s not wrong, what’s wrong is their personalities). The thing about these characters is that their main purpose in life is to find men, based on their appearance or status; the thing about these characters is that their resilience is proven if one of them sweats.

The stories could’ve been handled better, especially because these are short stories. Here you can find descriptions that aren’t relevant, things that won’t be mentioned again, and even tables attached as if they were essays.

The pacing, in general, is slow at the beginning of each story and too fast at their endings, which makes you feel dissatisfied. They’re unnecessary flashbacks, masochistic love, and some naïve woman. Also, there’s mentioned that the universal feminist dream is ending up with a man and family. Equality? Not in this book.

Both women and men have no depth, they only have lives filled with lies, pathetic people, expensive wine bottles,  and fashion brands, whose purpose is to show knowledge in that area somehow. Almost everything is about convenience and s*itty people can still get some kind of reward.

The image of love is wrong, although we all can fall in any of them, of course (masochistic, toxic, stupid). There’s a sentence that made me cringe intensely. A man takes one of these women to an art gallery because it had reminded him of her. That sounds kinda cute, right? And the resemblance turns out to be: “[He took her there] because he was thinking about her vagina.” Add a sarcastic smile here, please. Oh, mother of Thor!

The few tiny good things, a couple of sentences, intertextuality, and plot twists aren’t enough to make this book worth it. I’d definitely not recommend this book to anyone unless, like the author, such person has a fetish for khakis and calves.

I could read this book thanks to NetGalley and Amazon ;)

MICHELLE MILLER wrote pseudonymously until the publication of her debut novel, The Underwriting, which was translated into twenty languages and developed for television with Fox. She holds a BA and MBA from Stanford University and, in a past life, worked at JP Morgan's private bank. Michelle lives between London and Asheville, North Carolina, where she was born and raised.