Review: Friends Like These by Sarah Alderson

Friends Like These by Sarah Alderson
Publisher: Mulholland Books 
Publication date: December 13th 2018.
My rating: 4 stars

We all know someone like Becca. She has the job everyone wants, a designer wardrobe, a hot-shot lawyer boyfriend, holidays to exotic locations. And she flaunts her perfect life all over social media. It drove her colleague Lizzie mad, but she couldn't stop looking. They were never really friends - and yet Lizzie knew everything about her. Or did she? When chance, and a terrible mistake, pulls Lizzie back into Becca's orbit years after they lost touch, she'll realise that you can't always believe what you see online... and that finding out the truth might be the worst thing you can do. There's no such thing as a perfect life. Only a perfect lie.

I’m not normally one to pick up psychological thrillers, but when it comes to Alderson’s books, I have no hesitation in picking them up, and I’m glad that I ended up giving this book a go, because it seriously messes with your head (in the best way!). Alderson works the unreliable narrator role work so well here, the book starts off with a chapter from an unknown perspective, we don’t really know what’s going on, but as the book progresses you’re led to believe the narrator’s voice. She’s been through a rough time and you really have no reason not to trust her, so when we’re given a chapter from an alternative perspective, I was like no that can’t be true and to be honest I didn’t want to believe this side of the story at all. To the point that I got to right the end of the story and still couldn’t believe what had taken place.  

I don’t want to say too much without giving a lot away, but I’ve always assumed that I’m a pretty good judge of character, but with Friends Like These I couldn’t have been more wrong. I was so swept away by this character’s story and later ordeal that she had to go through because of this other person, that I was totally left dumbfounded by the end of the book. Once again, I have to praise Alderson here with messing with my head, as I could never have imagined that things would have gone down, the way that they had. On top of this my feelings were left all over the place with me wanting to take back all the anger and hate that I had directed at one character throughout the story towards the person that had deserved it all along.  

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book by Alderson, but thank you once again for luring me in with this masterpiece. The only reason I wasn’t able to give this book the five stars it deserves it because of the sick, yet gut wrenching ending, which I’m not sure I’ll ever get over.