Name: Amelia Hruby's review of Goddess Complex by Sanjena Sathian
Item: Goddess Complex
Rating: 4
Author: Amelia Hruby

Sanjena Sathian

Sanjana Satyananda is trying to recover her life. It’s been a year since she walked out on her husband, a struggling actor named Killian, at a commune in India, after a disagreement about whether to have children. Now, Sanjana is struggling to resurrect her busted anthropology dissertation and crashing at her annoyingly perfect sister’s while her well-adjusted peers obsess over marriages, mortgages, and motherhood. Sanjana needs to move forward—and finalize her divorce, ASAP.

There’s just one problem: Killian is missing. As Sanjana tries to track him down, she’s bombarded with unnerving calls from women seeking her advice on pregnancy and fertility. Soon, Sanjana comes face to face with what her life might have been if she’d chosen parenthood. And the road not taken turns out to be wilder, stranger, and more tempting than she imagined.

A darkly funny, vertiginous novel about the dilemmas of procreation, pregnancy, and parenting, Goddess Complex is a twist-filled psychological thriller and a feminist satire of our age of GirlBosses turned self-care influencers, optimization cults, internet mommy gurus, egg freezing, and much more.

Goddess Complex

Amelia Hruby

Annoyed, I plonked my drink on the nightstand and slunk into bed. I reached for my vibrator and opened Pornhub on my phone, uninspired by the pulsing, seething oiled bodies, I switched over to Zillow instead. I set a minimum total price of $750,000 and scrolled as I masturbated desultorily to a listing that boasted French doors and builtin bookshelves with ladders and window nooks. Twelve-foot ceilings and gleaming hardwood and a vast kitchen island. The blankness of an as-yet unlived, luxurious life. Jealous, Dr. Kim had said. Jealous didn't seem to cover it. I wanted to shatter and be reborn as a two-dimensional, pixelated figure, wandering through these vast homes, careless, my brain shut off, my needs all met. Just as I switched the vibrator all the way up, my thumb slipped, and I slid out of Zillow and into my iMessages, where an unread text awaited me, from a second unknown number. It had arrived within the past half hour.

Elizabeth

As soon as Dr. Kim pronounced “SUN-jun-ah” I knew this book was trying to do something. I liked the exploration of doubling, of a mother-self and other-self (but maybe no actual Self), of colonialism, of academia, of family.

Elizabeth &
Goddess Complex by Sanjena Sathian

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Elizabeth &
Goddess Complex by Sanjena Sathian