Keep Your Friends Close

by Paula Daly

[Leah]

When I was offered the opportunity to take part in Paula Daly’s blog tour for her new book Keep Your Friends Close, I was very excited. I haven’t had much opportunity to read many psychological thrillers, although I have many on my bookshelves, and I know that Paula comes very highly recommended, after her debut novel What Kind of Mother Are You? was ridiculously popular. So I was very excited to dip my toes into new and exciting waters. I’ve read a few psychological novels and felt they usually fall quite flat for me – Before We Met by Lucie Whitehouse being a particularly disappointing novel and I was a teensy bit concerned that the book world was just jumping on a new bandwagon after Gone Girl (which I haven’t read) without bothering to see if these books were good. But Keep Your Friends Close was quite a fantastic novel, and with on my next payday I will CERTAINLY be purchasing her debut novel.

Keep Your Friends Close is one of the most gripping novels I’ve read this year and mostly that’s in part to the very, very clever narrative. It mixes both the first-person and third-person to bring quite a unique view to the novel! It’s a bit like you’re watching a film and you can see the film unravelling from all angles, and I thought it was very, very clever. It all starts so innocently, with a “Seven Months Earlier” prologue that only becomes clearer once you read more of the novel – initially, it seems quite random, but it does eventually make sense and it is very clever. The novel then whips us to present day, where we meet Natty, and her family. Her husband, Sean, and their two girls Felicity and Alice. They live in the Lake District and run a successful hotel, even though it means they have little time for their marriage, so when Felicity becomes ill on a school trip in France, and Natty heads off to see her daughter, Natty’s best friend Eve steps into the breach, which Natty thinks is marvellous, until she returns from France and is told by her husband that he’s in love with Eve.

I have to be honest, the confession from Sean that he loved Eve knocked me sideways, because it was unexpected; I could see what Eve was doing, sure, but I didn’t expect love that quickly. But it really got the novel going. And from there the tension just ratchets up more and more, as Eve plays her dangerous game and poor Natty feels like she must be going mad. For the entire novel I was totally on Natty’s side. I didn’t feel like she did ANYTHING wrong, at all. Even though she did do some wrong things, I felt it was all very well justified (though perhaps not the big secret she was keeping, which was debateable). But anything to do with Eve and I was right there egging Natty on, even if it might have got her into trouble, because I so desperately wanted her to prove Eve as a liar and a manipulator. Don’t get me wrong, I sort of enjoyed reading about Eve, because she DID have style and her whiles were quite intriguing, but I didn’t like that she was doing it to such a lovely family. That she made them implode inside out, that make me so sad. They weren’t nasty people, so didn’t really deserve what Eve did to them.

I very much enjoyed Keep Your Friends Close. I raced through it (and not just because I had a review deadline!). It was fast-paced and frantic and the different narratives kept the pace bubbling along nicely, and I actually quite liked getting to know DC Aspinall (though as we meet her when she’s about to have a boob job, I was entirely certain she WAS a detective until a few chapters later!) and I just really wanted Natty to find SOMETHING, anything that would prove Eve was such a big fat liar, and I was very much satisfied with the conclusion of the novel. It was evil, but genius and very well deserved, I felt. Some might say it was even karma… Paula Daly is an immensely talented writer, and I was mightily impressed with Keep Your Friends Close from start to finish, and I actually couldn’t WAIT to finish – I know people talk about savouring books (WHAT?) but I couldn’t wait to get to the end, I literally couldn’t read the pages fast enough, because it was that exciting. I can’t wait to go back and read Daly’s debut novel and I will most definitely be on the lookout for any new novels on the horizon because this was immense storytelling, from an immense storyteller.