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A review by moreadsbooks
A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself by William Boyle
5.0
"'You hearing this? You're not laughing? Enzio wakes up with a boner, covered in blood. Old broad bopped him one with an ashtray. That'll teach you about consent.'"
William Boyle has written yet another winner (although would that I had been reading this at the beginning of June, as I did The Lonely Witness, instead of bloody March), this time with a yarn about a mob widow, an ill-advised cash grab, an Terminator-esque hammer-wielding mob enforcer, and one of the greatest characters ever to grace the page, former porn star Lacey Wolfstein. Boozy, empathetic, Stevie Nicks fan, possessor of pearls of wisdom such as: "'That bus crashed into that big-deal plane, and they're both here . . . Point is, we're all like that all the time. We're all unfinished wreckage. Whatever's not dead is fixable. You and Lucia, you're not dead. You've been surrounded by some bad things, that's true. But you've still got your life. You're a righteous woman, and I'm your pal.'" Oh yeah, and a bus crashes into a plane.
The thing that makes Boyle such great reading for me, other than the incredible dialogue and the fabulous characters, is that he's so damn good at crafting complex, darkly funny scenes with a lot of moving parts that ramp up deliciously and play out perfectly. At some point all of the main characters are gathered together in a house with a lot of the secondary hangers-on and someone has a gun and is waving it around but being ignored, someone is listing off the titles of Wolfstein's movies despite being told repeatedly that this really isn’t the time, someone keeps dropping his car keys while someone else is laughing at him, everyone is talking over each other and the whole time the hammer murderer guy is probably going to show up any minute and it just builds into this delirious crescendo that's hilarious and terrible all at once. Boyle writes, "Lucia is excited and confused, like this is Shakespeare happening in front of her," and well basically, yes. Five stars doesn't just happen every day, you know.
William Boyle has written yet another winner (although would that I had been reading this at the beginning of June, as I did The Lonely Witness, instead of bloody March), this time with a yarn about a mob widow, an ill-advised cash grab, an Terminator-esque hammer-wielding mob enforcer, and one of the greatest characters ever to grace the page, former porn star Lacey Wolfstein. Boozy, empathetic, Stevie Nicks fan, possessor of pearls of wisdom such as: "'That bus crashed into that big-deal plane, and they're both here . . . Point is, we're all like that all the time. We're all unfinished wreckage. Whatever's not dead is fixable. You and Lucia, you're not dead. You've been surrounded by some bad things, that's true. But you've still got your life. You're a righteous woman, and I'm your pal.'" Oh yeah, and a bus crashes into a plane.
The thing that makes Boyle such great reading for me, other than the incredible dialogue and the fabulous characters, is that he's so damn good at crafting complex, darkly funny scenes with a lot of moving parts that ramp up deliciously and play out perfectly. At some point all of the main characters are gathered together in a house with a lot of the secondary hangers-on and someone has a gun and is waving it around but being ignored, someone is listing off the titles of Wolfstein's movies despite being told repeatedly that this really isn’t the time, someone keeps dropping his car keys while someone else is laughing at him, everyone is talking over each other and the whole time the hammer murderer guy is probably going to show up any minute and it just builds into this delirious crescendo that's hilarious and terrible all at once. Boyle writes, "Lucia is excited and confused, like this is Shakespeare happening in front of her," and well basically, yes. Five stars doesn't just happen every day, you know.