If you ever dreamed of having a sleepover at your favorite museum to have unlimited exploring time, you’re my kind of nerd, and “Friends of the Museum” should be next on your TBR. Diane, director of a major New York museum, has been teetering on the edge of sanity to keep the place running for a while. When everything starts to crash down on the day of the museum’s most important fundraiser, she and her devoted compatriots spring into action. (Recommendation sent to WordSmarts.com email newsletter)

This is a soft DNF for me for now. I'm considering picking up a final physical copy and trying again with it. I have faith that if Mona Awad loved it, then I will too. The formatting was a little difficult to follow, especially on the eARC. I'm usually one who seems to be in the minority with loving low rated books, so that is actually even more encouraging for me to read this one.

Unfortunately, I had to DNF this one. I could not follow the format and the story wasn’t interesting enough for me to get past that.

Wow, what a unique story. Told over the course of 24 hours, this book explores how many characters related to a famous museum go about their day with secrets, sadness and rich interior lives. The number of characters was certainly overwhelming at first; I noticed it took me until about a third of the way through the book to be able to pick out the key characters we were following. At about the halfway mark I felt it “click” for me and really wanted to see what happened to each of the characters.

It’s a bit difficult to characterize this book — as other reviewers say, the lack of quotation marks and unique writing style almost made this more suitable to audiobook or even a tv show format. The couple chapters I was able to read via audiobook helped illuminate the writing style better for me. It’s very literary, and it’s hard to anticipate which of the characters you will enjoy. However, I think the stories wove well together and I enjoyed for the most part!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Told across an entire day’s worth of preparation for a major fundraising event at a New York museum, Friends of the Museum has a frenetic, choppy pace that is made even more confusing by dozens of characters coming in and out of the story. There are plots and subplots and interconnected events. It could have been very entertaining but it mostly felt like never ending nesting dolls of looted artifacts. McGowan spends so much time telling about all these various characters' quirks and anxieties that when things really start unfolding, it’s unsatisfying and tedious. Diane, the museum director, and her assistant Chris, are part of the main plot of the evening’s event. Another main player is the head of security, Shay, who spends most of the morning struggling with early onset dementia while maneuvering the indecencies of working with entitled white people. Shay’s plot alone could have been interesting but it felt more like an abandoned storyline from Crash, the 2004, ham-handed RACISM! AM I RIGHT? Oscar winning embarrassment. The subtle attempts of critiquing the art world felt clumsy and bumbling. At times, Friends of the Museum could be really funny, like when a curator says the word “vagina” when describing some art and almost kills a monied partygoer. Somebody does seem to die at the end and McGowan attempts to make us feel empathy. But after spending so many hours with these insufferable people I was hopeful for any number of them to perish.

Thank you to Atria and Netgalley for access to this eARC! I unfortunately DNF'd this read around 20% due to the formatting of the eARC mixed with the lack of dialogue markers. There were some areas where it was very hard to follow along, and with the underlying tone of anxiety and frantic energy around the event at the Museum, it was too difficult to continue. I hope to try reading the physical book sometime soon!

Thank you to Netgalley and Atria Books for the advanced egalley.

I was very interested in how Friends of the Museum is compared to The White Lotus, and it was blurbed by Mona Awad. I love museums so this thing sold itself, but I had a hard time connecting to characters, the dialogue style took too much getting used to, and it went on too long for my taste.

Friends of the Museum was an imaginative and mildly confusing adventure! It took time to immerse myself into the story and I found it difficult to separate the characters. I loved reading the political opinions but feel the book could be shorter and would appeal to more people. I recommend Friends of the Museum to anyone who enjoys satirical literature and would like an inside view of art institutions.

This book was not for me, I wanted to like it but it was kind of a slog to get through. The characters felt flat and the story was slow moving. DNF at 46%.

Maybe this book is just not for me. I liked the setting and some of the problems introduced in the first few scenes of this book. However, I hated the format of this novel. The heavily dialog based storytelling, combined with way too many characters, made for a shallow, boring book where I never did care about what the characters were doing. I felt like I was reading a screenplay, but with all the descriptions and background information missing. The conversations we were privy to did not seem necessary to the story half the time, and the possible plot-lines were too broken up for a novel. I could see how in a film one might switch back and forth between different threads the way this story tries to, but it did not work here. I wanted to like this one, but I really didn't.

This is a very character driven book. This follows the day in the life of several staff members of this museum in New York on the day of this large event. I feel like the plot was there but it was a little lacking in some areas for this to be a plot driven book. You needed to really connect and care about the characters in order to want to continue the story and see how their day went. This book is set in the span of 24 hours, and while I enjoyed that it did not offer enough time for me to connect to these characters. That coupled with the back and forth of the point of views made it difficult to follow. I feel like it’s a double edged sword, because on one hand if we eliminate characters we get less of the story and more connection, but if we added more point of views we lose connection and get more of the story. I was left very confused by if the point of this story was the museum aspect or the life story aspects. While I did enjoy the energy of this book and the themes it deals with, it was not what I was expecting.

I recommend eyeball reading this if this sounds interesting to you, and I also recommend reading this quicker than dragging it out, because often I would come back to the book and be confused where different POVs left off.

Thank you Atria and Washington Square Press for the advanced copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

Things go awry in a New York museum on the day leading up to an important gala.

I loved the premise of this one, but it did not deliver for me sadly. The writing was hard to get through. I don't even mind lack of quotes (at times) or out of the normal writing styles. But it just didn't come together here for me.

i love museums and i love books about them, but this one had far too many perspectives for me to have a meaningful experience with it. likewise, it had many interesting themes, but too many for them to be followed through to the end.

This one took me a little while to get into. There’s a big cast of characters and the story drops you right into the middle of a hectic day at the museum, so at first it was a bit confusing trying to keep track of who was who and what was going on.

But once I got a better sense of the characters and how their stories connected, it started to click. There’s a lot of sharp, dark humor and some great moments of emotional depth, though I did find that parts of it dragged a little for me. Still, I appreciated what it was doing, especially how it captured the chaos and dysfunction of a crumbling institution trying to keep it together.

Thank you for this ARC copy!! Heather McGowan’s Friends of the Museum is a dark comic novel that unfolds over a single, chaotic day at a struggling New York City museum. Structured as a ticking-clock tragicomedy, the book immerses readers in the lives of a sprawling cast of characters—curators, administrators, security staff, and kitchen workers—all navigating personal and professional crises as the museum prepares for its annual gala.

Friends of the Museum offers a satirical yet empathetic exploration of the art world’s inner workings, making it a compelling read for those interested in character-driven narratives and institutional critique.

Friends of the Museum takes place over 24 hours with each chapter covering a specific time.

There are a lot of characters and I had a hard time keeping them all straight. I was so excited to read this book but sadly it didn’t work for me. I just couldn’t keep track of all the detailed storylines with so many characters and the way book jumps around.

Thank you to NetGalley & Atria Books for letting me read this ARC.

I was excited to read this book, but unfortunately it was a slog for me. The story takes place within a single day at a museum that is most likely meant to be the Met or some other famous New York art museum. It's the night of a big gala, and everyone is supremely stressed and busy. In real time, we follow different staff at the museum through their work and personal lives.

This book is marketed as having a White Lotus-like vibe, but to me that's a real stretch to be honest. The blurb says by the end of the day someone will be dead, which makes it sound like a murder mystery and a lot more interesting than it actually was. All the characters were definitely complicated, but I didn't find myself caring about any of them or wondering what was going to happen to them. The writing style irritated me a lot - it was hard to tell who was talking most of the time, and the stream of consciousness didn't really work - and I found myself dreading reading this book. In writing this review, I've talked myself down from three to two stars, sorry :/ This just wasn't for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for an advanced reader's copy in exchange for an honest review!

I tried to get into this one but the weird formatting really took me out of it. I might go back to it eventually.

I'm not quite sure I am the right audience for this story, and I'm not quite sure that I read it at a time where I was in the mood for it. When the characters aren't my cup of tea, I also don't know if it is something to say about the character's personalities, or if it is the fault of the writer for failing to make their characters likable. When Normal People became a hit, I told myself that I was going to try and read the book before I watched the show. However, as soon as I saw that there were no quotation marks when the characters were speaking, I grew hesitant because I knew that it would throw me off at some point and I didn't want to get thrown off and waste the story. This was something similar to that. I had trouble with the large cast, I had trouble with the lack of quotation marks, and I had trouble liking the characters overall. I'm assuming that because this novel takes place in the art world at a museum the cast is supposed to be pretentious and self-righteous. But it seems like they hate everyone! They make fun of people for being fat, they over sexualize women, even the women over sexualize themselves to the point that it's all we know of their physical description. It was hard to like anyone in the book, and it was hard to follow their character arcs. But to be fair, I wasn't able to devote as much time and energy into understanding each and every aspect of this novel as I was needed to. Perhaps I will be able to go back and feel differently once I reread it. Perhaps I am just not the right audience.

This was not what I was expecting and quite disappointing. I love museumes and wanted to read something more about that, not people being jerks.