Frenemies

by Megan Crane

[Leah]

As Gus Curtis approaches thirty, she has everything that she feels she needs to really become a proper grown-up. She has a great job, good friends and a good boyfriend. Until she walks in on her so-called ‘good’ boyfriend Nate liplocked with her so-called ‘good’ friend Helen sending Gus’s life into a bit of a tailspin. Gus keeps telling everybody that she’s fine but it’s proven that she’s clearly not when she makes a fool of herself one night, all thanks to Janis Joplin. One inadvertent hook-up later and Gus’s life is looking more like a teenage drama than the grown up life she’s trying to achieve. Is the reason for Gus’s lack of adulthood really down to Nate and Helen’s betrayal, or does Gus need to look closer to home to learn what it takes to become an adult?

I’ve heard quite good things about Megan Crane but until now I haven’t gotten around to picking up any of her books. I was asked by one of the people who work for her British publisher what I thought of her and I told him I wasn’t too sure as I couldn’t manage to find any of her books to read and he offered to send me some of Megan’s books. Because I couldn’t wait to be able to get back to him to tell him what I thought, I decided to give one of Megan’s books a read as soon as I could and settled on Frenemies because of its fantastic title!

At the back of Frenemies, Megan Crane discusses why she decided to write Frenemies and she said she decided to write it after watching the movie Mean Girls and says that real life is so much worse than what is portrayed in the movie and that she wanted to write about ‘that’ girl, the girl who will stab you in the back whilst looking you in the eye. That is pretty much Frenemies in a nutshell and is a pretty good topic to focus on. A lot of chick lit books do indeed feature cheating but I think this is the first book I have read where it’s someone you believe to be a friend who does the dirty with your boyfriend which is what happens to Gus. To make it even worse, after Helen betrays Gus by cheating with Nate, she then acts like nothing has happened and that she a Gus can be BFFs thus making her a ‘frenemy’ (a mash up of ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’, if you weren’t already aware!).

The book is told entirely from Gus’s point of view, which means we get to know Gus really really well and I admit, I liked her. I liked the fact she had lived in her same one-bedroom apartment pretty much since College and I loved that her apartment looked as if she had robbed a library, with piles of books everywhere. It made it so easy to imagine her apartment, full to the brim with books. Sure, some things annoyed me about Gus: how she easily believed Nate would come back to her and had been brainwashed into cheating with Helen, and how she kept letting Helen follow her and talk to her, whereas any sane person would be slapping her and telling her to get lost. Apart from those minor irritations I liked Gus very much along with her hilarious dog Linus.

There were a few other characters present in the book; Nate and Helen for starters and I didn’t like either of them at all, Gus tries to make us think Nate is somehow ‘trapped’ with Helen but I think that was just so she could delude herself into thinking she could get him back more than there being any real truth to the matter. I would have liked a bit more of an explanation as to why Helen did what she did, but she never told us. The other important characters to the book were Amy Lee and Georgia, Gus’s two best friends. I wasn’t a huge fan of Amy Lee. She was very snippy and short with Gus and although I could understand why (Gus does get VERY annoying about Helen/Nate) I didn’t like that she did it. Amy Lee completely explodes toward Gus and Georgia at one point in the book and it all gets explained away very conveniently and, like Gus, I wanted more of an explanation. I know she had her excuses for it (an excuse I saw coming) but I found it annoying that that is what she blamed it on. I loved Georgia though, she was my second favourite character. Finally we had Henry Farland, Nate’s room mate and Gus’s sparring partner. We learn a lot about him via Gus but all wasn’t as she told us, and I did find him a bit charming!

Frenemies is written in a very chatty tone, making it easy for me to get into the book and speed through the pages. The book is under 300 pages long, and doesn’t feel too short or too long. The book is set in the USA, in Boston which I loved. I’ve never been to Boston, but it’s a place I would love to visit so I liked the fact Gus lived there, near to Fenway Park! I definitely can’t wait to read more of Megan’s books after I enjoyed Frenemies and I’m very glad that, so far, I don’t have THAT girl in my life…