BEST FRIENDS FOREVER
Jennifer Weiner
Atria Books
Fiction
ISBN: 9780743294294
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
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