Our reading group was lucky enough to be gifted a set of books from The Reading Agency this month, so we all settled down to read the brand-new crime novel How to kill your best friend by Lexie Elliott. Telling the tale of a group of best friends, Georgie, Lissa and Bronwyn, the novel begins with the funeral of Lissa, who’s drowned off the coast of the luxury island resort she owns with her second husband. Taking us through dysfunctional relationships, infidelity, jealousy, and revenge, the book has several plot twists and a satisfying ending. One of our members commented that once they had started reading they thought they was possibly reading the plot to the next episode of Death In Paradise!
Our reading group discussed various aspects of the book, including the nature of Georgia, Lissa and Bronwyn’s relationships. The overall impression was that they were intense, but akin to cliquey schoolgirl relationships, with popular girls and jealousy woven into the plot of the novel. We agreed with the character Bronwyn that the group of friends don’t know everything about one another, but that we don’t necessarily know everything about our friends even our closest friends but that’s OK.
We discussed Lissa’s extreme reaction to infidelity and felt that blaming it on her parents was a convenient reason for her best friend to excuse her behaviour. We certainly felt that there were more reasonable ways to react to your partner or friend cheating. On the whole our group related more to Georgie than Bronwyn, and were glad that she’d found her way out of what was for her a mostly toxic friendship group. We won’t spoil the twists, but although some of us had some inklings, on the whole they came as a surprise!
We’ll be moving onto a gentler read for next month’s book, The Library by author Bella Osborne. Perfect for Libraries Week http://librariesweek.org.uk/ we’ll be meeting virtually on 4th October 2022 at 12.30pm. See our Reading Group page for more information.