| Title | Margo’s Got Money Troubles |
| Author | Rufi Thorpe |
| Copyright | 2024 |
| Type | Fiction |
| Length | 302 Pages |
| Finished Reading | Augst 10, 2024 |
| Notable | Optioned by Apple for a series staring Nicole Kidman |
| Ratings | Personal: 4 Stars Goodreads: 4.0 (28,909 ratings) |
Warning: This is an adult book with adult language and activities. So, this report is a bit bluer than my usual G or PG posts. If that is a problem for you, then skip this post.
This dark comedy follows Margo, a freshman at a Community College, who becomes pregnant by her English teacher. Against the advice of her friends, her boss, her teacher, and her emotionally distant mother she keeps the baby and encounters a host of troubles. She is fired from her job, her roommates leave, and her mother and friends are of no help.
She kept thinking, as she nursed him, I am so fucked, I am so fucked. Because all around her she could feel the echoey space of no one caring about her or worrying about her of helping her. She might as well have been nursing this baby on the moon.
Page 10
But Margo is tough and starts to make a living in a controversial but lucrative career. This choice puts her further in the hole with her mother – who is no great shakes herself, and almost everyone else. Eventually her father, a retired professional wrestler and promoter, comes to her aid – though he has is own issues.
Although society pushes for single mothers to keep their babies, society does little or nothing to provide the necessary physical or emotional support.
She’d thought, somehow, that keeping the baby would make people regard her with more kindness. But women frowned at her and Bodhi in the grocery store. The eyes of men skittered over her like she was invisible. She seemed to walk everywhere in a cloud of shame. She was a stupid slut for having a baby, and if she’d had an abortion, she also would have been a stupid slut. It was a game you could not win. They had tried to warn her: her mother, Mark, even Becca.
Page 8
And when they take practical, legal but controversial steps to help themselves, they are further judged and punished. Jinx’ (Margo’s dad) helps Margo promote her business.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may know I’m interested in the point-of-view of novels. The previous novel I reported on – The Bee Sting – is told from the point of view from each of the four members of the family. In Margo’s Got Money Troubles, the story is told by Mao; but interestingly enough, she tells some parts in first person and others in third.
It’s true that writing in third person helps me. It is so much easier to have sympathy for the Margo who existed back them rather than try to explain how and why I did all the things I did. [Page 15]
This is a very fun and quick read. Spoiler alert, Margo and her child come out fine. I know my synopsis doesn’t make it seem like a funny novel; but it is quite entertaining – and provocative in its examination of people and jobs on the scruffy edge of society and how society says it values one thing but then really doesn’t. I liked it so much I followed it immediately with Thorpe’s “The Knockout Queen”.
