Sarong Party Girls is about Jazzy, a young Singaporean woman and her friends. They are a hedonistic bunch, constantly clubbing and partying, always on the lookout for potential husband material - definitely rich and preferably white - to provide them with the ultimate accessory, a Chanel baby.
Jazzy's voice is spiky and sassy. The book is written in Singlish giving it an immediacy and vibrancy often missing from written English. Don't be put off by that though, it's not difficult to read, just English with the odd slang word thrown in. And it doesn't matter if you don't know exactly what the word means - you'll easily get the gist of it from the context.
For the first half or so I really enjoyed this - it's lively and fun. But after a while I started to get worn down by the content. Jazzy's world is a sexist and misogynistic place - men frequently have mistresses or even second families and women are treated appallingly. Her casual acceptance of this is depressing. Not only does she fully expect that her boss will replace her with a younger woman before she is thirty regardless of her ability, but she also knows that he seats her in his office so he can look up her skirt. Worse still, she is complicit in this - making sure that if she is wearing a short skirt, she matches it with nice underwear. Even more depressing is her belief that her only way out is to marry a rich white man and swap this life for a gilded cage in a foreign country. As her search leads her to seedier and seedier places she does finally reach a new level of awareness, but it was too little too late for me.
Jazzy's voice is spiky and sassy. The book is written in Singlish giving it an immediacy and vibrancy often missing from written English. Don't be put off by that though, it's not difficult to read, just English with the odd slang word thrown in. And it doesn't matter if you don't know exactly what the word means - you'll easily get the gist of it from the context.
For the first half or so I really enjoyed this - it's lively and fun. But after a while I started to get worn down by the content. Jazzy's world is a sexist and misogynistic place - men frequently have mistresses or even second families and women are treated appallingly. Her casual acceptance of this is depressing. Not only does she fully expect that her boss will replace her with a younger woman before she is thirty regardless of her ability, but she also knows that he seats her in his office so he can look up her skirt. Worse still, she is complicit in this - making sure that if she is wearing a short skirt, she matches it with nice underwear. Even more depressing is her belief that her only way out is to marry a rich white man and swap this life for a gilded cage in a foreign country. As her search leads her to seedier and seedier places she does finally reach a new level of awareness, but it was too little too late for me.