Customer Reviews

Best Friends

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(23)
1 star:		(27)

 

 

ISBN 1573229350 - I really, really wanted to like this book. A "valentine to the staying power of women's friendships" sounds like a book that, as a woman, I ought to like. I am still dismayed to realize I basically finished it only because I started it - proving that it is, at least, a valentine to the staying power of my stubborn streak.

Clare and Sally met as roommates in college in 1973 and their friendship spans the rest of their lives, through husbands and kids and divorces and tragedies. Clare is from Ohio, Sally from California. It is Clare, as the voice telling the story, whose point of view the reader sees everything from. She is dazzled by the wealth of Sally's family and by California in general, but that wears off as she finds out the secrets of the Rose family. Each time Clare comes into possession of one of the family secrets, she is tempted to run to Sally with the information, knowing it will ruin Sally's relationships with her family members but not particularly caring - if it helps her keep Sally to herself, it seems to be fine with Clare.

First, there's not a single character in the entire book over the age of 10 that I didn't absolutely despise. That's a problem that the book never gets past, because the storyline isn't good enough. It suffers from an almost ridiculous level of drama - the "crimes" (both legal and moral) of both girls' fathers, the way the various characters die, Clare's not-quite-gay attempts to push everyone else out of Sally's life, it's all just too much to be interesting and becomes laughable. Clare's weird love of her roommate comes out in strange sentences - "...trying to make up for my obvious disappointment at seeing her pregnant again. I couldn't believe it. It was almost more than I could stand, that she and Peter had thrust themselves together again." Who thinks of their friends' pregnancy in those terms? Who even thinks of their friends in those terms at all??

If high drama were the only problem with the storyline, it might not have been as bad... but it's not the only problem. The storyline seems to be summed up with "they met in college and stayed friends all their lives". Big deal, that's not a novel, it's a sentence! Even Clare's dedication to her AIDS patients doesn't do much to make up for the fact that she comes off as a terrible, selfish person surrounded by lots of other terrible, selfish people. The best that can be said of the book is that Moody made excellent use of events (the beginning of AIDS awareness, the OJ trial, the Godfather movies) to set the time frame clearly for the reader. I'd read something else from her if I came across it, but pass this one by, it's not worth the effort.

- AnnaLovesBooks

Wow,and this is her first novel! Intelligent, insightful- Clare Mann would be proud of Moody's use of adjectives. This author has a gift for intricate detail that brings her characters to life. I normally read medical/legal thrillers...but this book captivated me for the entire weekend. Loved it!

This first novel tries to do too much and one gets the feeling the author is riding a runaway pony. AIDS, childbirth, men, lies, [physical activity], drugs, and rock and roll - Where are world wars and espionage? That's all that's lacking in this too-long attempt to explore the dynamics of friendship between two women (one from the Midwest, one from LA) who met as college roommates. Good idea, but Moody tried to pack too much into one book.

I picked this book up on a whim and read the whole thing in one sitting. The style I found refreshing, with the stops and starts and skips ahead interesting...there was always something new coming up. Although the premise might not be groundbreaking, the sheer number of issues and situations covered in the book are staggering...which I didn't really realize until I was finished. I really could identify with the characters and found myself thinking about my life during and after my read. I am a student, so the chance to lounge in the sun reading so intently for a day was is a luxury...and I'm glad I spent my time with this book! It's a good summer read, but that's certainly not to suggest that it's fluff. Personally, I found it much more substantial and eloquent than Summer Sisters.

I liked this book, for the exact same reasons that others who reviewed it did not. Although there are many women who have the type of best friend with whom they share every detail of their lives, there are just as many who love each other so much that they honor the idea of keeping secrets from each other. In contrast to an earlier reviewer's experience, my very best friend and I were inseparable from the age of 5, but we could not have been more different, and there were things I never knew about her until she was terminally ill. Only then did she feel that she could/should share certain "secrets" with me. This book is a testament to the fact that not all women "tell all" even to their best friends. The two main characters, Clare and Sally, although very different in temperament and social upbringing, are very similar in their inability to develop deep emotional ties. Sally seeks to fill her emptiness by having children and avoiding unpleasantness, while Clare seeks to fill hers by surrounding herself with the cold reality of death in her work with AIDS patients, and in relationships with men she cannot have. Both are deeply scarred and shaped by their childhood experiences, and this book explores the effects of poor parenting in an unflinching manner. I enjoyed the book, although I would have preferred a more concrete ending. For a first novel, it is quite good, and I would certainly recommend it. It would make a great book for a women's book club, for I would imagine the debating about the depth of the character's devotion to each other and what they "should" have shared would be a hot topic!

A well-written book that gets off to a great start but quickly dissolves into a bleak and meandering cavalcade of lives wasted and destroyed. Way too depressing for me. Like other readers, I was ultimately sorry I spent the time reading it. But if you don't mind bleak and depressing, the author does write well, so you might enjoy it.

I really liked this book and would like to see more from this author. The main thing I liked was the style of writing - very uncoventional the way it jumps from subject to subject and back and forth in time. It feels more real and less contrived than other novels. Less predictable. Even though I have nothing in common with the characters, I felt that they were portrayed realistically in the sense that there was good and bad in all of them. They had confilicting emotions and morals, just like all of us. It made me want to write a book of my life in the same style. I didn't want the book to end, so I felt the ending was appropriate because it didn't really end. A "normal" wrap-it-up ending wouldn't have fit the style of the book, in my opinion.

Martha Moody writes about two "Best Friends" - Sally and Clare. When they first meet at Oberlin in college, Sally - to Clare - had a perfect life: A big house in L.A., a father she spoke to every night and who read her school books with, a cute younger brother...
When they first became friends, Clare wished her life could be like Sally's. But no, her father was embezzling money from a business he worked for and ended up dying while Clare was in college, she didn't get along with her brothers, she had no family money...
And, as they grow - Sally and Clare - the reader is touched by the truth in their friendship. It reminds me of my best friend, when Clare takes note of the lenghth of time she and Sally have been friends for and how little they see one another. But with best friends, even if you have not seen them for a long time, when you do see them it is like you were never apart.
Of course, there are always family issues and events and problems that both drive the two apart and also keep the two friends together. The fact that Sally and Clare barely needed to speak to communicate reminds me of how things are with my best friend. People seem to be criticizing this book because it does not show Clare and Sally spending time together so often. But, that's life. And that is what friends are for.

Claire and Sally went from teenagers to 40ish and still had the same issues, still had the same problems, still acted the same, and still treated people and each other the same. THEY NEVER GREW UP. My reading group chose this book and most of us had the same opinion after we read it: Why did the author keep throwing conflicts at the two main characters if she wasn't going to let them learn and change?

With so much conflict going on, you'd think one of them would learn something, but with dysfunctional families, embezzlement, pornography, drugs, homosexuality, promiscuity, divorce, suicide, murder, having babies, abandonment, and adultery, these girls manage to stay the same, immature and self centered.

Amazing.

I picked this book up at the airport and was halfway finished with it by the time my plane landed. It was very easy to read but I have to say this author managed to forget one major component to what makes a good novel- creating memorable characters. Not only were these characters not memorable that weren't even really that likable. I never understood what made them tick or even more importantly why they were even friends. With all of that said, I did enjoy the hardships and problems the characters had to deal with and overcome throughout the novel. So basically story line- 5 Characters- 1 and you end up with 3 stars.