What My Best Friend Did

by Lucy Dawson

[Leah]

When Alice goes off to LA for a photo-shoot the last thing she expects is to come home with a new best friend. Her life has gotten fairly mundane of late and so when Alice meets Gretchen it’s like a breath of fresh air has opened her eyes to fantastic new possibilities. Gretchen is like no one Alice has ever met before; she’s beautiful and impulsive and Alice’s life is suddenly sparkling again. But Gretchen isn’t all she seems and there are ticking time bombs hidden below the surface just waiting to explode. When one of Gretchen’s bombs do explode, it teaches Alice a lesson she will never forget about just how explosive female friendships can be.

A couple of years ago, I came across a book called His Other Lover, which is Lucy’s debut novel. The blurb sounded incredibly intriguing but I wasn’t too sure what I would think of it. I did however give it a read and I thought it was mind-blowing. It was a fairly short book but it managed to pack a lot into it’s pages. It was a truly fantastic debut novel and it wasn’t like anything I’d ever read before. It wasn’t chick lit as I’d ever read before. It was dark, it was compulsive and and I just plain old couldn’t put it down. Of course, after reading His Other Lover I set about seeing if Lucy had any more books in the works and her second book What My Best Friend Did was released in 2009. It shocks me it’s taken until 2010 to finally read it but I always worry that it won’t match up to the previous book!

What My Best Friend Did starts off in quite shocking fashion. Alice is talking to an ambulance operator because something has happened to Gretchen, who we learn is Alice’s best friend. Alice is frantic with worry over Gretchen and it immediately got me hooked. We then, as the book progresses, learn how it got to the point where Alice was in Gretchen’s living room waiting for an ambulance to arrive. It’s a very clever way of telling the story. We get a few chapters of the present and then a few chapters leading up to the event of the present with no indicators to tell you it’s changing, not that it’s hard to tell the difference, I must say! It also means that instead of having everything come out all at once, it’s as if it’s building to this big massive event and I just couldn’t wait to get there to find out what it was.

I thought What My Best Friend Did was a little slow-going to start with (after the pacey opening chapters) but I was soon gripped and it got to the point where I just couldn’t put it down. I think that’s mainly down to how fantastic Lucy Dawson is at creating her characters. What My Best Friend Did is very character driven, it’s the characters that drive the entire thing rather than the plot which is unusual but it works. Alice and Gretchen are like rubber and glue and yet somehow their friendship not only takes off on the pages but comes across incredibly realistically too to me, the reader. In Gretchen, Lucy has created a stunning character, she’s hugely flawed but it’s also so easy to see why Alice falls under her spell. Gretchen was, for me, the most realistic character of the bunch and she was fleshed out really really well. A lot is revealed about Gretchen as the book progresses and it all makes her more and more real in my mind. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t like her, not at all, but she is the type of character who will stay with you long after you’ve finished the book.

In actual fact, none of the characters in What My Best Friend Did are in any way likeable. Not even Alice, our protagonist. Not really. And yet I still liked her; I can’t explain it. She was a bit mean at points, downright nasty in others, but somehow she pulled me in and I did like her. Usually when I dislike a character, it feels as if I’m just tolerating them for the rest of the book. Not so with Alice. If you’ve read the book, you can probably see where I’m coming from. It’s hard to explain in a review, it’s more of a ‘you have to read it to understand it’. Apart from Alice and Gretchen the only other two main main characters are Tom and Bailey, Tom who is Alice’s ex and Bailey, Gretchen’s brother. I don’t feel we really got to know either men well enough for me to judge accurately but they both have their flaws, too. A lot goes on between Alice, Gretchen, Tom and Bailey and not all of it is particularly nice but I thought it was all unravelled and explained very well.

The ending of What My Best Friend Did is shocking. I saw a few of the revelations coming, but not the most important one of all. It made me re-evaluate everything I’d already learned about the characters and my opinions of them certainly changed. It was definitely a satisfactory revelation. It wasn’t as if it was all built up and then fell flat, I thought it matched the rest of the book very well. My only problem was the actual ending itself, the last page in fact. I was expecting an epilogue of some sort because it just ended. I know that sometimes endings are a bit more open-ended but with such a strong book with such a dark undercurrent, there were lots of things left unfinished which is a shame.

Overall What My Best Friend Did is well worth reading. It truly was a stunning read despite my feelings over the last page of the book. Lucy Dawson is a fantastic writer and the quote from Louise Candlish saying that Lucy’s style of chick lit is much darker than the norm is spot-on. I highly recommend both of Lucy’s books and I eagerly await her third novel, due out later this year!