Please Join Us – Catherine McKenzie

Summary

At thirty-nine, Nicole Mueller’s life is on the rocks. Her once brilliant law career is falling apart. She and her husband, Dan, are soon to be forced out of the apartment they love. After a warning from her firm’s senior partners, she receives an invitation from an exclusive women’s networking group, Panthera Leo. Membership is anonymous, but every member is a successful professional. It sounds like the perfect solution to help Nicole revive her career. So, despite Dan’s concerns that the group might be a cult, Nicole signs up for their retreat in Colorado.

Once there, she meets the other women who will make up her Pride. A CEO, an actress, a finance whiz, a congresswoman: Nicole can’t believe her luck. The founders of Panthera Leo are equally as impressive. They explain the group’s core philosophy: they’re a girl’s club in a boy’s club world.

Nicole is all in. And when she gets home, she soon sees dividends. Her new network quickly provides her with clients that help her relaunch her career, and a great new apartment too. The favors she has to provide in return seem benign. But then she’s called to the congresswoman’s apartment late at night where she’s pressed into helping her cover up a crime. And suddenly, Dan’s concerns that something more sinister is at play seem all too relevant. Can Nicole extricate herself from the group before it’s too late? Or will joining Panthera Leo be the biggest mistake of her life?

Review

Eh.

There was just too much going on. The author wanted to tackle a lot of serious topics + have a lot of twists, and in the end, what came out were seriously underdeveloped side plots, and the end was filled with “This is what is happening! “No, actually, THIS is what’s happening!”. Meh.

Ever since you read the synopsis, you know one of the main themes, if not the biggest, is that everything comes with a price. However, this ended up not being the case, and instead, this lesson gets discarded in favour of the social aspects it wants to cover: the #metoo movement and sexual harassment. This in no way is a bad thing, but the way these topics were highlighted was done poorly and came out of absolute nowhere, kind of an agenda deus ex machina.

There was quite a bit of build-up, though I wouldn’t classify this as a slow burn aspect, and the team building we see when the women’s motivations for being in Panthera Leo start to reveal themselves was the highlight of the book.

I was actually disappointed and quite bummed with my feelings towards Please Join Us because, when I read this, I was very much in the mood for a cult book, and I ended up with a twisty mess, kind of a bad kitsch book.