What Price Friendship..? (The Things We Do to Our Friends suspense Book Review)

Keep your enemies close, and your friends, well—

keep an even closer eye on them...

 

The damage we do—or at least, that we can do—to each other, is horribly immense in its scope and variety. 

 

We’ve become inured to it, frankly, because we see it EVERYWHERE. Trolls going off on someone or something, online. Hate speech. Political upheavals.

 

But we also see it closer to home. Family members, intentionally hurting or neglecting those they should hold precious. Lovers, seemingly forgetting all of the reasons they came together, in the first place. 

 

And close friends, taking perverse delight in using and wounding those whose darkest secrets they carry and were sworn to protect.

 

Heather Darwent gives us a look at all of these in her compelling psychological suspense debut, The Things We Do to Our Friends.

 

Often people choose universities where they’ll feel right at home… either because the school is, literally, close to their home, or because many friends go there. 

 

But a smaller group (including me) choose the opposite... a place where no one knows them. Where they can finally become who they really are... or at least, who they want most to be.

 

Clare falls into that latter camp. She selects a tabula rasa for her studies… the University of Edinburgh (a far cry from Paris), where no one knows a single thing about her.

 

It’s hard, setting out on your own, but it’s the only way to make a new beginning, to craft a new “you”…which is something Clare very much wants to do.

 

She finds a room with two other girls (nice enough, but not the sort she wants for friends). She gets a part-time job in a dive bar (and also into a “situationship” with the pleasantly-ordinary barkeep, because, well... needs must). She signs up for a typically-motley group of freshman classes.

 

And on the very first day of art history class, Clare spots THEM.

 

The girls she wants to become.

 

They’re so obviously the embodiment of her goal... a trio of young women radiating confidence, smelling of wealth and posh living, and exuding the assured power that only the most-privileged girls can. 

 

The hierarchy is easy for Clare to parse: beautiful, reed-thin blonde Tabitha is The One... the undeniable leader anyone would follow (straight into an inferno or off a gangplank into the midnight depths of the ocean, most likely).  

 

The other two, in sharp contrast, are The Support Staff. Imogen, the plainer and pragmatical one, who gets things done; and Ava, the exotically-foreign-born picture of elegance, dripping with money and an ineffable “otherness”.

 

Gradually, Clare manages to find an “in”. The three girls—along with Tabitha’s handsome, lad-about-town childhood friend, Samuel—begin to include Clare in their lives... inviting her over for dinners and fun nights in (or out).

 

Is she “one of them”? No, no... not that, certainly... but she’s closer than anyone else is, which is a pretty big deal.

 

As the semester wears on, though—and Clare is privy to more of Tabitha-and-company’s plans—she begins to realize that she isn’t the only one with a motive other than pure, altruistic friendship.

 

The girls (and Samuel) have hatched a Grand Plan--a deviously-dark scheme, which smacks of everything Clare has been trying desperately to run far from--insisting that Clare is an integral part.

 

And they won’t take “no” for an answer.

 

So, she begrudgingly goes along with them... buoyed by Tabitha’s giddy exuberance, and calmed by the casual nonchalance of the other three.

 

Until she reaches her tipping point, that is... the moment of real clarity, when she sees only one possible way to move forward.

 

One where she’s no longer under Tabitha’s spell...

 

The Things We Do to Our Friends is the book that finally snapped me out of a two+ month-long reading abstinence (yes, really). So, is it good? Definitely.

 

Darwent’s prose is powerful (and often, lyrical). Clare is a complex young woman, and seeing things through her eyes—all that she thinks, with regard to other people, certainly, but also the things she doesn’t come right out and say or ponder--offers tantalizing glimpses into the past she’s doing her damnedest to leave far behind... but never revealing too much.

 

My only niggling complaint, if you will, is the speed at which the resolution (The Big Reveal) happens, once Darwent gets there. After the level of suspense maintained throughout the story, the ending fell a bit flat because it was somewhat abrupt. (Nonetheless, the ending completed the story, so in that sense, it was fine.)

 

The Things We Do to Our Friends is a darkly-twisty 

(and twisted) look at the lengths we’ll go to for friendship... and the ones we won’t. Well worth the read. 

~GlamKitty