Best Friends

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I was gripped by this story of Kendra, Dani and Lindsey, who have been best friends forever! Now they have children of their own, and each of their teens are best friends to each other. One night, a horrific event takes place while the teens are hanging out. One ends up dead from a shotgun wound, another is in coma due to a shot to the head, and the other is alive but seemingly unable to talk and explain what happened. This creates a domino effect in the lives of the three women and their families. Many friends to lovers books can also fall into the category of second chance romances where friends may cross the line into lovers’ territory but then something happens that drives them apart until they reunite a certain time later. It's a horrible nightmare -- one that I, personally, cannot contemplate too deeply as a mother of two young boys. And I would be remiss if I did not forewarn readers that the subject matter of this novel is very disturbing at times and may make for a difficult read, particularly for those who are parents.

Additionally, the book had so many domestic thriller tropes imaginable. The abusive husband, a secret affair, the drunk parent, the random plot twist that did not make sense at all, and of course, the “good wives but bad mother” trope. I am tired. KS was 15. Initial reaction to death of Zia-al-Haq, was fear. With him you knew what was coming next. Then Benazir Bhutto , as a young girl was exhilarating. Excitement. Endless possibilities.. This is the story of two life-long friends. In the opening of the book (Karachi, 1988 - a significant year), we meet Zahra and Maryam as teenage girls and already “best of friends”. I nearly stopped reading the book after this opening section because it all feels a bit teenage/YA as girls start to experience their adult bodies (and the effect those bodies can have on men) and as they share their dreams and ambitions for their future and fight with their parents over what they can and cannot do. Then there’s some unpleasantness before we skip forward to 2019 and see the two women now in the UK holding jobs convenient for creating tension in the developing story line. This book was fantastic, tragic, and beautiful all at once. I loved the friendship parallels between the mothers and their sons. It was easy to form connections to the characters and I saw pieces of myself in each woman. Their history was well developed and the drama and familiarity among the characters perfectly fit the storyline. Though the subject matter was heavy and this was a very emotional read at times, I liked that there were enough side stories to detract from the tragedy a bit. I liked that some of the storylines didn’t completely wrap up and left us to imagine how things unfolded. I can’t recommend this one enough!! A lot of other readers love this book. Reading is a very personal subjective experience, and not every book is for every reader. So, if you enjoyed the extract, and the plot summary interests you, please do read Final Cut by S.J. Watson. I hope that you are one of the many who love this book.Zahra’s sympathy-eliciting social inferiority and her commitment to justice can be read as idealised self-presentation on the part of Shamsie, also a Karachi grammar school-educated journalist’s daughter. But the strongest hint of autobiography lies in her bookishness and sensitivity. In a lovely demonstration of both, Zahra is reading the dictionary when she informs Maryam they have a “friendship”, whereas with everyone else it was “merely propinquity – a relationship based on physical proximity”. Later in life she feels torn between “Proclivity Zahra”, who shags strangers in toilets, and “Suitable Zahra”, who courts dependable marriage prospects. Her sense of self is mediated by words and the writerly interest she takes in their semantic possibilities. THE AUTHOR: Dr. Lucinda Berry is a former clinical psychologist and leading researcher in childhood trauma. Now, she spends her days writing full-time where she uses her clinical experience to blur the line between fiction and nonfiction. She enjoys taking her readers on a journey through the dark recesses of the human psyche. Overall, I thought I was getting a thriller, but it was not even close to one, and I'm not really sure what it was about other than following their toxicity for like 80 years. This author's unique writing style just isn't for me. I had to have something from Lewis Carroll on this list. An important poem about not making the wrong kind of friends. The story unfolds against General Zia’s death and at the celebrations following Bhutto’s democratic election win, Zahra and Mayram’s increasing interest in boys leads to an incident whose repercussions lose Maryam her Grandfather’s respect and her heritage and ends with her being sent to school in England.

This was more of a domestic drama rather than a mystery in the vein of Big Little Lies. There is nothing wrong with a domestic drama, I just had different expectations going into the book because of the false marketing. If it actually spent some time solving the mystery than highlighting the pointless family drama, then I would have had a better time. What a ride this was. Neither character is particularly likable or relatable in my opinion. It was a little difficult to follow along at times, but most chapters were pretty short, and it was only took about 2 1/2 hours of my time, so that kept me going. I'm seeing others say there are no quotation marks and it reads like a play in the print form, so I guess that's why it's confusing in the audio version. In 2019, both of them migrate to London but lead very different professional lives. Maryam works as a successful venture capitalist with ties to the right wing government while Zahra is an advocate for human and civil rights, who is appalled by the same government’s treatment of immigrants and the rise of populism. And secondly perhaps related is that the key reason the characters in this book still have friends and meet acquaintances (one key concept in the book is the difference between the two, identified early on “Zahra had recently looked up from a dictionary to inform Maryam that what the two of them had with each other was friendship, and what they had with the other six girls and twenty-two boys in class was merely ‘propinquity’ – a relationship based on physical proximity) from their school in Pakistan many decades later in a different country (England), basically because they all both come from and remain in privileged and influential circles – something that meant I struggled to even want to identify with the characters. As each mother tries to discover what happened that night, secrets start to surface. Secrets each woman has held close, the husbands are keeping, and even that the boys were concealing.The line between love and hate really can be thin sometimes. Not usually, but it is in this case. A strange codependence even when out of each other’s lives. It was very depressing but hauntingly interesting. The writing, the characters, the emotional arc, the spiciness and the beauty of the words shared is just amazing making this one of the best friends to lovers books I’ve ever read and one of my all-time favorite romances. This book was really boring, there was nothing to hold on, the characters are all fake which was one of things I hate the most. There isn't any mystery at all is more drama family than anything. But then again, I'm pretty hard to please with thrillers if you like short chapters and drama family you are more than welcome to read this book. Audience Question:Which of the characters is KS . Neither. I sit in a room reading and writing and I am not interested in looking at me. Interested in my times. In terms of the plot, the prologue was gripping and I was 100% engaged, after that the story went downhill. The first half of the book was so messy. I could not get all the characters straight and they all started to blur together, to the point that I had to actually draw up a diagram to discern everyone from each other.