Book Review – Girl Friends by Alex Dahl @AriesFiction

Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for Girl Friends by Alex Dahl. My thanks to Andrew at Head of Zeus for inviting me to take part in the tour and for my review copy via NetGalley. Do hop over to Instagram and check out the posts by my tour buddies for today, Kim at StratosphereGirl and Chloe at The Secret Book Review.

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About the Book

THEY CAN BUILD YOU UP

Charlotte has it all: the successful career, the loving family. But, secretly, she is dangerously bored of her life. So when she meets free-spirited Bianka, it feels like fate – Bianka is exactly the person that Charlotte needs.

OR TEAR YOU DOWN

On a girls’ trip to Ibiza, home is forgotten as Charlotte dives head first into a life that is looser, wilder. She feels free, but there are devastating consequences: someone doesn’t return home.

As the aftermath of the holiday rips through her life back in London, Charlotte soon regrets ever breaking out of her carefully constructed routine – and begins to wonder whether meeting Bianka was really an accident at all…

Format: ebook (374 pages) Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication date: 11th April 2024 Genre: Thriller

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My Review

If your guilty pleasure is reading novels about wealthy people whose carefully constructed lives fall apart, then you will love Girl Friends. The story unfolds from the point of view of three characters: Charlotte, Bianka and Bianka’s stepson, Storm.

Charlotte has become an online sensation as the ‘Keto Queen’. She’s a self-confessed control freak whose image is carefully curated and whose domestic life is rigidly organised. But behind the facade, everything’s not so perfect. Her marriage to bank executive Andreas has become stale and passionless so she lives for her boozy get togethers with her friends Anette and Linda, fellow Scandinavian ex-pats. When Andreas asks her to cosy up to Bianka, the wife of his boss Emil, she agrees but, boy, does she not realise what she’s getting herself into.

If Charlotte is an expert at controlling herself then Bianka is an expert at controlling others. And, it transpires, she has a history of it. (As the book progresses, we get little suggestions that experiences earlier in Bianka’s life might have contributed to her need to control.) Bianka fawns over Charlotte wanting to learn every detail of Charlotte’s life but without giving away too much about her own. What she does divulge is, one suspects, often complete fiction carefully designed to create a bond between them. Bianka dresses to stand out, seems assured in any social situation and proves up for anything. It’s that adventurous spirit that proves irresistible to Charlotte.

Charlotte’s decision to invite Bianka to the annual ‘girls only’ trip to the family villa in Ibiza doesn’t go down well with Anette and Linda but by this time Charlotte is too dazzled and besotted by Bianka to care. Egged on by Bianka, long afternoons dozing on the terrace, morning yoga sessions and trips to fancy restaurants are soon replaced by wild, hedonistic parties where all forms of intoxication are available. From that point on it’s like watching an impending train crash. But who is the driver, who is the passenger and will anyone else be injured in the process?

In case you think I’ve forgotten Storm, I haven’t and, in fact, his was a storyline I really enjoyed. He is much the most empathetic character in the book, although that wouldn’t be difficult. Why is it, he wonders, that his father and, in particular, his stepmother Bianka are so reluctant to mention Storm’s mother Mia, or the circumstances of her death, supposedly the result of a freak accident in the mountains. As he digs into the past, memories that he’d previously suppressed start to emerge and what they reveal is shocking.

With its mix of intrigue and glamour, Girl Friends is like an exotic cocktail but one that will leave you with an almighty hangover in the morning and perhaps yearning for the carb hit of a piece of garlic foccacia. I confess I wasn’t a fan of the epilogue-type ending which seemed a little farfetched. But that apart, Girl Friends is the perfect beach read or book to get you through a long, otherwise tedious journey.

In three words: Glamorous, twisty, dark
Try something similar: Her Perfect Life by Sam Hepburn

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About the Author

Alex Dahl is a half-American, half-Norwegian author. Born in Oslo, she studied Russian and German linguistics with international studies, then went on to complete an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University and an MSc in business management at Bath University. A committed Francophile, Alex loves to travel, and has so far lived in Moscow, Paris, Stuttgart, Sandefjord, Switzerland, Bath and London. She is the author of five other thrillers: After She’d Gone, Cabin Fever, Playdate, The Heart Keeper, and The Boy at the Door, which was shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger. 

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