A locked-room mystery about five college friends eager to reunite after years apart--only to be ripped apart again when their host's disappearance unearths dark secrets and old grudges.
... a brooding meditation on how friendships buckle when we resent other people’s success ... Great dialogue and strong, relatable characters give this novel extra bounce that keeps the pages turning.
Gehrman slowly and skillfully doles out one bit of recovered memory at a time as June gets closer to the truth, and as the innocence of each character is questioned in turn ... With intimate character studies and breathtaking suspense, The Girls Weekend deals with old relationships turned brittle with age, inviting the reader to an idyllic haven and then abruptly shattering the calm.
Suspense ramps up about a hundred pages in. Until then, this slow-moving story consists mainly of SAT (Sitting Around Talking.) In early pages, June, a college professor, has a conversation with one of her students in a scene that seems only peripherally related to the actual story. The book is written in present tense which some readers might find off-putting even though it's a popular literary construct these days ... Sorry to say The Girls Weekend doesn't deliver the implied potential of its title. The actual writing is fine, the narrative flows, the dialogue is realistic, even the people are realistic, but it's hard to like a book with so few reasons to like the characters. It's a light beach read for teens and twenty-somethings who dream of living in an estate like Sadie's but end up living June's life instead. The over-the-top description of what it's like to be uber rich seems to be more an illustration of what it's like to waste money ... The ending is a long, long, twisty multifaceted reveal with more SAT. With so many possible killers, readers have many options and are bound to finger the right one at some point in the story, but the motivation might not be so readily guessable ... All in all, it's a Mean Girls reunion that needed more, but also needed less.
