It's not surprising that it's an extremely dark book; it is surprising, however, that it's one of the funniest novels in recent years ... It takes a special kind of audacity to write a comic novel about teenagers with eating disorders, but Thomas executes it brilliantly. She doesn't use the girls as punchlines; it's the adults, clueless and casually cruel, who she sets in her sights ... By contrast, Thomas describes the girls' bruised psyches with a real gentleness that never turns patronizing ... understated, deeply sad moments, contrasted with the novel's bizarre plot and gleefully dark humor, turn the book into something special, multi-faceted; it certainly feels like something that hasn't really been attempted before ... And it's Thomas' boldness, as well as her writing — every sentence seems painstakingly constructed — that make Oligarchy such a remarkable novel. It's brash, bizarre and original, an unflinching look at a group of young women who have become 'hungry ghosts, flickering on the edge of this world.'
... a fast, fizzy read ... Thomas is satirically attuned to the intricate frustration of teen life, the ignoble obsessions of puerile minds and the speed at which hygiene, decorum and false pretences vanish in a single-sex boarding institution. This makes for an entertaining, irreverent and wrong-hilarious read ... The novel is full of brilliant lines and I’m deliberately not quoting the best ones, to save them for buying readers ... [Thomas] is on a red-hot streak of invention right now and these narratives succeed because of the novelist’s deep understanding of the cracks and quirks of such communities ... When Thomas slows down for a moment I am reminded how excellent her dialogue is ... Despite the occasional spangles of darkness, this is hugely enjoyable. It’s about as menacing as a cool girl’s black glitter nail polish – and just as much fun.
As an eating disorder survivor, I feel Thomas has perfected a balance of the hypocrisy associated with the handling of the illness and the ultimate bleakness it can present. The black humour that glues the themes together only makes it more identifiable, and provides vital commentary on diet culture ... beautifully written, with each sentence as bewitching as the last. Although focused on the lives of the privileged and wealthy, Thomas has something important to say about the potential vulnerability of young women in general, no matter your background ... Full of black humour and witty realism, Oligarchy is a dark and shimmering gem.
Thomas’s humor has a sharp, rhythmic perfection. Her prose is fast-thinking, entertaining and punchy, her dialogue fully authentic without sinking into the tedium of real-life conversation ... Oligarchy is a study in obsessiveness pinned to a vague, whodunit structure we don’t really need, with a couple of barely felt deaths thrown in. But in Thomas’s hands we don’t care ... Intriguing, fluid and frequently funny interior monologues are what Thomas does best.
Following girls who purposely starve themselves into a stupor could easily become grating, but it never does in Oligarchy. We stick with the girls—through various diets, when their weight swings up and down and back up again—because Thomas laces the lowest of lows with the enduring allure of not eating, taunting the reader with the hopes that keep the girls shaving off calories ... Thomas’s girls remain compelling because they so badly want whatever thinness offers that the origin or soundness of the impulse is beside the point ... They don’t always know what they want, or why they want it. But Thomas doesn’t ignore or justify their desires, which is why the girls’ desperation—e.g., subsisting only on pineapple—isn’t irritating or pitiable.
Thomas has penned a sharp-eyed novel about the pressure society, adults, and peers put on girls to look and behave a certain way. When Natasha isn’t at school, she’s in the company of her aunt, who tells her over and over that she must hang on to her beauty at all costs. Thomas deftly explores exactly what those cost are, and the toll they take on young women.
Thomas has a perfectly pitched ear for human cruelty and self-delusion ... and all the wild tortures young girls subject themselves to just to feel pretty in the world. B+.
...a British writer who excels at delivering novels about difficult subjects, turns her brilliant, incisive gaze to a boarding school ... It’s a bracing reminder that no matter how obsessively young people measure themselves against one another, their self-worth also comes from the grown-ups around them ... a strange but urgent glimpse into society’s often conflicting expectations of girls.
What Thomas pulls off here is astounding. This is a truly funny book. It is acerbic. It is mean-spirited. It is heavy (and I don't just mean weight gain). The characters are flawed and sometimes intensely unlikable, but they are also naive and susceptible to peer pressure and scared to be different and just so crazy-believable. I was rooting for all of them to survive ... Thomas is a master at burrowing into everyone's insecurities. She jumps from mind to mind, unraveling the fears of students and faculty alike. Natasha and her friends may communicate in a whole new way, but the real revelation here is how much we’re all alike in our secret interior worlds.
... a dark and disturbing mix of social satire, mystery, and fairytale ... Thomas’s unsparing and visceral portrayal of their lives and dangerous obsessions, while not sympathetic, is penetrating and perhaps for some readers even triggering ... would succeed as a novel on the intellectual merit alone of the interplay between the girls’ class privilege and an ultimately deadly preoccupation with image, but Thomas makes the curious decision to add an element of mystery to the story involving the school’s headmaster that feels incongruous and hurried, too easily explaining away the darkness at the heart of the book and denying a satisfying resolution to any of the girls’ predicaments. In the end, despite a wealth of witty and perspicacious turns of phrase, the novel feels uncertain of its purpose and stops just short of its mark.
Slowly, Thomas turns her characters’ collective diet obsession into a source of warped female solidarity, which makes for a strangely destabilized reading experience ... Oligarchy uses the familiar phenomena of adolescent copycatting and boarding-school insularity to cannily—and eerily—create a world that feels women-focused but proves to be the reverse. Outside fiction, misogyny and thin privilege—to borrow a term popularized by the writer Cora Harrington—have a comparable, if more diffuse, effect. For girls and women, thinness comes with a measure of social acceptance that often serves as an incentive to lose weight, even if that process is arduous, time-consuming, expensive, or dangerous. In Oligarchy, too, bodily control seems to bring the girls closer to power. But more often, it distracts them, or stands in their way.
Thomas does a fantastic job of capturing the mental and verbal style of a contemporary teen without being precious or exasperating. She also imbues Tash with a signature feature of all adolescents ever, probably: a desire to grow up faster ... This is a weird, twisty book, and anyone familiar with Thomas’ oeuvre will expect the kind of dark humor that is only possible from a writer of profound compassion. Strong stuff ... Another strange delight from one of the United Kingdom’s most interesting authors.
... satisfying, keenly observed ... Thomas’s depiction of the image-driven hive mind that dictates adolescent girls’ relationships is spot-on ... Though Thomas’s characters get a lot of flak for being insufferable rich girls from outsiders in the novel—and they are—she’s captured with an empathetic eye all the brutal, visceral, and surprisingly funny aspects of teenage girlhood. This is a sharp, astute novel.
