Vriendschap

"Imagine it’s a couple of years ago, the summer between seventh and eighth grade. You’re tan from lying out next to your rock-lined pool, you’ve got on your new Juicy sweats (remember when everybody wore those?), and your mind’s on your crush, the boy who goes to that other prep school whose name we won’t mention and who folds jeans at Abercrombie in the mall.”

As the book opens we are introduced to five vile, spoilt bitches. Their leader is Alison, (“signature” phrase “I’m Ali and I’m fabulous.”, who is perfect and adored by everyone as well as the kind of girl who enjoys mocking “dorks” to their face and calling her friends fat or a slag. The whole group are not only rich, they are the sort of rich people who snub the nouveau-riche for having the wrong type of mansions and pride themselves on their “noble bloodlines”. They are also absolutely obsessed with Abercrombie (which I believe to be a chain of clothes stores aimed at Sloane Ranger types and given to oppressing minorities and women) and inappropriately sexualised for their age, blushing at older boys and admiring their “totally grope-worthy stomach muscles”, running about naked in cornfields for fun and playing a game called “Olympian Sex Goddesses”. (Having said that, 3½ years later one of them is embarrassed by thinking the term “boob parts” in reference to a bra. So maybe they’re not as mature about sexual matters as they think). Their inane nothings are interrupted when 13-year-old Alison mercifully goes missing, a fact which is reported to the police a mere 36 hours later.

Nobody is particularly bothered by this disappearance, and we move on 3½ years to Alison’s parents throwing all her belongings onto the pavement and leaving, opening the way for a new girl from “San Fran” to move into the neighbourhood and Alison’s bedroom. Thirty seconds later, peer pressure from this new girl with awful taste in music has led Emily to smoking pot, in a scene difficult to take seriously as no one has ever actually offered anyone a joint with the words “Want a hit?” At exactly the same time Aria moves back from Iceland, where she has become a vain Hipster, and immediately commences swanning about driving without a license (on the advice of her mum), whining about how much better European beer is, misusing the word “irony” and sleeping with a stranger in a pub toilet. Will that come back to bite her? Yes, it almost immediately will. Meanwhile fat friend Hanna has developed into an uber-popular bulimic flasher and become best friends with the previously uncool Mona, now an attention-seeking poor-little-rich-girl shoplifter. Finally our fourth heroine Spencer is occupied being jealous of her sister and planning to steal her current boyfriend, the stupidly named English-Korean Wren, as well as talking about such mysterious acronyms as Aps, GPAs, VPs & JVs.

Once everyone’s teen-drama problems are set up (glamorous issues only, none of them ever has a “pimple” or anything dirty like that) they meander about mentioning products, brands and shops every 4th line, most of which I am unaware of and/or not interested in. Suffice to say, they all have an obscene amount of labelled clothes and expensive jewellery to wear whilst they shag their teachers, drink red wine, incongruously quote Sartre and have glamorous panic attacks at the thought of their “dead” friend Alison. The only interruption to this is some vaguely sarky but strangely apposite texts messages and notes each of them receive at inopportune moments, signed ‘A.’ Who could it be?

Various cheesy seductions occur (the kiss-on-the-cheek between female friends that goes a little too far, the hot-tub massage on spurious medical grounds) and a seemingly endless parade of fashion designers are mentioned as we hear far too many details of the girls’ wardrobes. Characters worry about such difficult to sympathise with issues as how calorie-laden vodka and lemonade is. The girl Emily fancies repetitively mentions how great everything was back in “Cali” once every two minutes and reminisces about cutting herself in order to tick another box on the “teen issues” chart. Spencer continues to encourage the inappropriate behaviour of her sister’s boyfriend, even though he seems somewhat of a stalker-pervert type. During a traditional teen horror movie dream sequence Aria’s doorbell rings to the tune of “American Idiot” by Greenday, which brings a much-needed note of mockery to proceedings. Unfortunately it’s only one note against the symphony of logomania and status obsession. Hanna experiences the kind of drink related total memory loss that only happens on TV even though a car crash is exactly the type of thing that normally leaves a couple of memories, particularly in someone who wasn’t even acting more than mildly tipsy. In summary, a lot of people do stupid things.

The dénouement is the finding of Alison’s body, which turns out to have been buried in a large hole in her own garden, which was filled in for no reason by suspicious builders just after she disappeared. There is no mention of either the builders or her family being questioned regarding this, nor of an internal investigation into what the hell the police were doing totally failing to consider this possibility until the new owners of the house decided to dig up the garden for a new tennis court. This bring our 4 heroines to the same location, namely the memorial service, where they eventually discuss the matter of their knowledgeable stalker. No one actually learns anything, except that all four of them are too stupid to think to turn their phones off at a funeral. The stalker remain unidentified. Their silly dramas drag on. The secret of what exactly they did to their unfortunate victim “Jenna” remains hidden. And everyone wanders off to wait for the next book.

Most Random Accusation Directed at the Reader

“You thought only girls who entered beauty
pageants ended up on the sides of milk cartons.”

“Before Ali, the girls had felt like pleated, high-waisted mom jeans…but then Ali made them feel like the most perfect-fitting Stella McCartneys that no one could afford.”

“She was a nearly straight-A, four-time state champion butterflyer”

“COED NAKED BUTTERFLY”

“he claimed that all Icelandic boys were ‘pussies who rode small, gay horses’”

“Spencer tried not to giggle at the word sac.”

Doringbell Friends, the ultra-hip Quakerschool