Leah
Written on Nov 29, 2013
The Best Thing I Never Had is very much a story about friendship. Yes, it also features love and relationships, but at it’s core, it features on seven friends. Harriet, Sukie, Nicky, Miles, Leigha (name check, alert, though it’s spelt wrong), Adam and Johnny. At University they were all close, they all hung out together, until Harriet and Adam started spending more and more time together, which meant the inevitable happened, but instead of telling their friends about it, they lied. They kept it a secret. For so long, that when the secret eventually came out, so did the recriminations, especially those from Leigha and Sukie. They hounded Harriet, until she felt she had no choice but to retreat. Until she had to eventually give up the one thing that meant the most to her. Now, six years later, a wedding invitation drops through each friends’ letterbox, telling them Nicky and Miles are finally getting hitched, meaning a reunion is on the cards, but just how will it work with so much animosity?
I absolutely loved The Best Thing I Never Had. It blew me away from start to finish, it absolutely did. It is very much in a similar vein to Katy Regan’s (fabulous) novel How We Met, and I loved how it was split into two parts, how we got to find out how the friendship imploded before we had to deal with the reunion at the wedding. It was funny, it was honest, it was a proper look at how friendships can sometimes make or break you. How even the people who are meant to be the closest to you in the world can turn on a dime and leave you out in the cold. It was hard to read at times, because I felt Leigha and Sukie hadn’t just stopped talking to Harriet, they’d abandoned her completely and even sort of bullied her. I’ve had that happen to me, and it’s the worst feeling in the world. That your best friends, who know most of your secrets, can do that, is awful, and so I never really cared about Sukie or Leigha. If they had walked in front of a bus, I probably wouldn’t have felt sad because they were horrible, awful girls. Leigha in particular was just plain evil, and her vendetta against Harriet was spiteful and nasty, and it surprised me that sensible Nicky, sweet, sensible, stuck in the middle Nicky, allowed her to be that way.
Harriet and Adam were by far my favourite characters. I was so taken in with their story, I adored seeing the relationship develop from friends to something more and I felt Lawless did them justice. It was so sweet. Of course, it didn’t stay that way, but for that while, I felt happy for the pair, which made it worse when the inevitable happened. I quite liked Johnny, Adam and Miles’s flatmate, too, though I don’t agree with the things he did, but I can also understand he was under Leigh’s spell so I sort of had pity for him. This was such a wonderful read, one I thoroughly enjoyed getting into, and one I wished never had to end because I could have read about their lives indefinitely. Erin Lawless is a fabulous writer, and she deserves all kinds of plaudits for her writing because it is super. I was hooked, let me tell you, and even when the book was down, I was still thinking about it, still wondering about it, desperately hoping for a happy outcome. The only thing I would have wished to have seen in the novel was Leigh’s come-uppance. I felt her nastiness deserved retribution, but maybe I’m just being bitter and selfish. Or, y’know, maybe how it ended was her retribution. Who knows? I, for one, can’t wait for Erin’s next book because The Best Thing I Never Had was mind-blowingly good and everyone should read it.