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lizanneinkan 's review for:
Friends and Strangers
by J. Courtney Sullivan
Women sometimes view other women as luckier, more privileged, more stable, better dressed, prettier. Women’s friendship can be tricky with this blend of admiration and resentment as Friends and Strangers explores.
There is a scene early on at a women’s book club that told me I would enjoy this book. The character, Elizabeth, is privately judgy and publicly demure, trying to like this situation when she’s out of sync.
The two central characters are Elizabeth, a writer and new mother, and Sam, her college-student nanny and an artist. Each are at a point where they feel isolated and misunderstood, and they form an instant bond. Elizabeth and her husband have left their hip Brooklyn existence for a small college town upstate; Sam’s boyfriend is 12 years older, lives in a London, and wants her to marry him and live his dream in a country cottage.
As the women develop more perspective on each other, the friendship wavers. Elizabeth doesn’t seem to care about how much she spends, which Sam finds thrilling then alienating. Sam, a scholarship student, has ties with the Hispanic women she works w in the college cafeteria and must budget carefully to avoid seeming working class at a private college; she tries to balance the varied friendships and to seem at home in all places. Elizabeth comes to see how young and inexperienced Sam is, and finds it hard to watch her make bad choices; this beats dealing with her own problems.
Class is a driving issue here as I’d the nature of friendship and trust. The pace is just right—good mix of introspection and action.
There is a scene early on at a women’s book club that told me I would enjoy this book. The character, Elizabeth, is privately judgy and publicly demure, trying to like this situation when she’s out of sync.
The two central characters are Elizabeth, a writer and new mother, and Sam, her college-student nanny and an artist. Each are at a point where they feel isolated and misunderstood, and they form an instant bond. Elizabeth and her husband have left their hip Brooklyn existence for a small college town upstate; Sam’s boyfriend is 12 years older, lives in a London, and wants her to marry him and live his dream in a country cottage.
As the women develop more perspective on each other, the friendship wavers. Elizabeth doesn’t seem to care about how much she spends, which Sam finds thrilling then alienating. Sam, a scholarship student, has ties with the Hispanic women she works w in the college cafeteria and must budget carefully to avoid seeming working class at a private college; she tries to balance the varied friendships and to seem at home in all places. Elizabeth comes to see how young and inexperienced Sam is, and finds it hard to watch her make bad choices; this beats dealing with her own problems.
Class is a driving issue here as I’d the nature of friendship and trust. The pace is just right—good mix of introspection and action.