NetGalley – What Cathy Read Next…

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.

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

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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About the Book

Book cover of Bonjour, Sophie by Elizabeth Buchan

It’s 1959 and time for eighteen-year-old Sophie’s real life to start. Her existence in the village of Poynsdean, Sussex, with her austere foster-father, the Reverend Osbert Knox, and his frustrated wife Alice, is stultifying. She finds diversion and excitement in a love affair, but soon realizes that if she wants to live life on a bigger canvas she must take matters into her own hands.

She dreams of escape to Paris, the wartime home her French mother fled before her birth. Getting there will take spirit and ingenuity, but it will be her chance to discover more about her family background, and, perhaps, to find a place where she can finally belong.

When Sophie eventually arrives in the Paris arising from the ashes of the war, it’s both everything she imagined, and not at all what she expected…

Format: eARC (448 pages) Publisher: Corvus
Publication date: 4th April 2024 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

Fifteen years might seem a long time after the end of the Second World War but in fact its impact lingers on, as the author deftly explores in Bonjour, Sophie. For some, like Sophie’s foster mother Alice, war had been so much a battle for survival that even the slim pickings of life offered afterwards are, if not enough, then better than nothing. For others, there are physical scars but also mental scars from the things they saw and the things they were forced to do in order to survive.

Along with her dream of a more fulfilling and independent life, Sophie harbours a deep need to know about her father, a man she never met, including how he died. Was he the hero of the French Resistance she has always believed him to be?

Having made it to Paris, her first job involves contact with people who also looking for someone but for quite different reasons. She describes them to her friend Hettie as ‘drenched in yearning’. Her own search for answers involves some subterfuge, as well as ignoring the warnings that she may not like what she finds out. ‘War triggers vendettas. Paris was, and is, not exempt. Asking questions exposes secrets, and some are best left hidden.’ A brief glimpse of a more luxurious lifestyle proves tempting but, she realises, would bring the sort of obligations and constraints she has set her face against.

Paris offers Sophie myriad new experiences which help to banish, albeit not completely, memories of the disappointments, losses and unpleasant experiences of her life in Sussex. Yet even here, the buildings carry the marks of conflict. ‘The war was over. The war was not over. Peeling paint. Damaged stonework.’

Sophie makes a spirited and engaging heroine. She’s intelligent, witty and once she has decided on a course of action she is resolute – and resourceful – in following it through. I also liked the storyline involving Sophie’s friend and confidante, Hettie, who belatedly embarks on her own journey from the constraints of parental and societal expectations.

Bonjour, Sophie is an engaging, nuanced coming-of-age story that captures a world on the cusp of social change and I very much enjoyed spending time with Sophie on her journey.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of Corvus Books via NetGalley.

In three words: Absorbing, insightful, emotional
Try something similar: A Complicated Matter by Anne Youngson

About the Author

Elizabeth Buchan was a fiction editor at Random House before leaving to write full time. Her novels include the prize-winning Consider the Lily, international bestseller Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman, The New Mrs Clifton and The Museum of BrokenPromises. Buchan’s short stories are broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in magazines. She has reviewed for the Sunday Times, The Times and the Daily Mail, and has chaired the Betty Trask and Desmond Elliot literary prizes. She was a judge for the Whitbread First Novel Award and for the 2014 Costa Novel Award. She is a patron of the Guildford Book Festival and co-founder of the Clapham Book Festival.

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