Friend Request
Ratings18
Average rating3.7
"Maria Weston wants to be friends. But Maria Weston's dead. Isn't she? 1989. When Louise first notices the new girl who has mysteriously transferred late into their senior year, Maria seems to be everything Louise's other friends aren't. Authentic. Funny. Brash. Within just a few days, Maria and Louise are on their way to becoming fast friends. 2016. Louise receives a heart-stopping email: Maria Weston wants to be friends on Facebook. Long-buried memories quickly rise to the surface: Those first days of their budding friendship; cruel decisions made and dark secrets kept; the night that would change all their lives forever. Louise has always known that if the truth ever came out, she could stand to lose everything. Her job. Her son. Her freedom. Maria's sudden reappearance threatens it all, and forces Louise to reconnect with everyone with whom she'd severed ties in order to escape the past. But as she tries to piece together exactly what happened that night, Louise discovers there's more to the story than she ever knew. To keep her secret, Louise must first uncover the whole truth, before what's known to Maria-or whoever is pretending to be her-is known to all. With her mesmerizing debut, Laura Marshall offers a timely and essential story of how who we were shapes who we become, the hidden cost of our increasingly connected world, and the dangerous shape that revenge can take in our modern era"--Jacket.
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Actual rating: 4.5 stars
I'm so SO impressed by this book. I couldn't stop reading and I definitely didn't see the final twist coming! There was one little detail that seemed pretty obvious to me, but that didn't ruin the story at all. This author is definitely one I'll keep watching.
Such an interesting premise!
Imagine getting a Facebook request from someone whose death you had a hand in 25 years earlier at high school?
This one kept me turning the pages to see whodunit!
Thoughts immediately after completing:
I, like many people I believe, have a love/hate relationship with social media. The fact is, while social media and sharing has many benefits, in the wrong hands all that information can be terrifying. You lose out on so much by not being “connected”, and it's becoming that you no longer have a choice to disconnect. This really means you have to take the good with bad. What I'm trying to say, is that the premise of this mystery thriller offered so much possibility, the idea behind it being so close to home to all of us. This could have been a really fantastic and terrifying thriller if plotted well.
Well, it wasn't. Repetitive and poorly paced, the story never took off and even if it had, I found out very early on that I really didn't care. The protagonist, Louise, was infuriating, and I found her fears and insecurities both unreasonable and ridiculous at times. I don't think this is being marketed as young adult, I've seen no mention of that anyway, but it really should be as the whole plot revolves around petty high school drama. That wouldn't have really bothered me personally (although it was not what I was expecting), but what did bother me was the fact that present-day Louise, in her 40s, is still dwelling on her school-girl days and has not moved on in the slightest. It's just a bit sad, really, that she has not gained any perspective with age and still frets constantly about what people thought of her back then. I couldn't connect with her at all and that, along with some cheesiness and overall dull prose, put me off the book all together.
Thoughts one month on:
I've not been able to publish this review until today, 2 weeks before publication, at the request of the publisher. Thinking back on the book, nearly one month later, and in particular the ending, I have to say the ending was pretty good. If this were any other mystery thriller, one that I'd enjoyed reading just a bit more, then I would probably be praising the ending. Thinking back, it was a fairly realistic and believable conclusion, given the circumstances, something I've really wanted from many books of the genre I've read recently. The problem was that by the time I'd reach that ending, I really didn't care anymore, having not enjoyed the rest of the book much at all, so that made it hard to appreciate the ending. Honestly, although I've been tiring of the ridculous, OTT twists and turns of many mystery thrillers, at least the experience of reading them is fun? Not something that can said about this one, at least not for me personally.
