Best Friends Forever: A Novel
by Jennifer Weiner
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jennifer WeinerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-07-14
ISBN: 0743294297
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Atria Books
Book Reviews of Best Friends Forever: A Novel
Book Review: The Novel is Replete with Weiner's Tell-Tale Self-Effacing Humor
Summary: 5 Stars
As kids, Addie Downs and Valerie Adler become fast friends when unconventional Valerie moves in across the street from mousy Addie. Days and years pass in Jennifer Weiner's BEST FRIENDS FOREVER with the two side by side, eating casserole meals with Addie's family and taking road trips (dining on Tab and French fries) with Valerie's divorcee mom. They seem inseparable, until Valerie does the unthinkable --- she blossoms and starts to hang with the more popular crowd. Quiet Addie falls to the wayside and becomes Valerie's punching bag at school.
The best friends go their separate ways. Addie gains weight, loses both her parents, drops a few pounds, and finds herself living alone and caring for her brother, who years before suffered brain damage in a car accident. Lonely, she seeks romance, unsuccessfully, on the Internet. Tall, slender Valerie, on the other hand, has become a weathergirl on the local TV station and is considered somewhat of a homegrown celebrity. A high school reunion brings her back to town on the night of one of Addie's dates gone wrong (let's just say the guy believed he had been abducted by aliens). A knock on the door, and there stands the estranged Valerie, wearing blood-stained clothes, reminding Addie of their long-lost friendship, and begging her for help.
What ensues is a mystery of sorts, but the mystery is second to the gal-palship that is reunited in BEST FRIENDS FOREVER. Weiner does two things very well, and they are here in abundance. First, she knows women: their insecurities (about men, about weight, about anything) and their relationships (with men, with women, with food). Second, she knows humor, and how to apply it to women and their insecurities (about men, about weight, about anything) and their relationships (with men, with women, with food).
The novel is replete with Weiner's tell-tale self-effacing humor, this time aimed at two endearing women whose friendship rivals that of Thelma and Louise --- even if Addie does remind Valerie at one point that they are not the infamous film duo. True to her writing history to date, Weiner once again gives us real women, likable in all their character flaws and reminiscent of the women we know or are. (Addie and Valerie will remind you somewhat of sisters Rose Feller, plump and insecure, and Maggie Feller, thin and often oblivious, in Weiner's popular IN HER SHOES.) The flashbacks to Addie and Valerie's childhood antics --- painting bedrooms, clamming, convincing their parents to throw a New Year's Eve party for the neighbors (tuxedos encouraged) --- brought back a flood of my own happy memories of girlhood friendships. And I found myself smiling A LOT while following Addie and Valerie's friendship.
BEST FRIENDS FOREVER reminds us that we don't always know why things happen or why people feel the way they do. And it reminds us that true friends, as cliché as it may sound, will still be there 15 years later no matter what has happened.
--- Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara
Summary of Best Friends Forever: A Novel
Bestselling author Jennifer Weiner?s dazzling new novel Best Friends Forever explores the impact of love, desire, and familial loss on a friendship between two young women, and how the choices they make will change their lives forever.
One of the nation?s most beloved and successful writers of women?s fiction, Jennifer Weiner has become a literary phenomenon with millions of copies of her books in print. Her latest work, Best Friends Forever will delight fans and critics alike, following the ups and downs of a long-time friendship between two young girls who grow up to be two very different women. Addie Downs and Valerie Adler were eight when they first met and decided to be best friends forever. But, in the wake of tragedy and betrayal during their teenage years, everything changed. Val went on to fame and fortune. Addie stayed behind in their small Midwestern town. Destiny, however, had more in store for these two. And when, twenty-five years later, Val shows up at Addie?s front door with blood on her coat and terror on her face, it is the beginning of a wild adventure for two women joined by love and history who find strength together that they could not find alone.
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