Pretend I'm Your Friend

by M.B. Caschetta

A sister’s darkest secret is revealed at her brother’s wedding. A woman with extrasensory visions accidentally gives her philandering husband her blessing. A dying mother wishes her cancer was her daughters’, not hers. Pretend I’m Your Friend lays bare the fear, loss, and pain of love, sex, and family life in eleven crisp, engaging, and startlingly funny, elegantly entwined stories. MB Caschetta is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Her novel Miracle Girls won the USA Best Book Award for Literary Fiction, an Independent Publisher Awards Gold Medal in Spiritual Books, and was an LGBT IndieFAB 2015 Book of the Year. Miracle Girls was also a Lambda Literary Award Finalist and a People Pick-of-the-Week, where it was hailed as "darkly beautiful." Caschetta lives in Massachusetts with her spouse and standard poodle.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

216 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2016

About the author

Mary Beth Caschetta is a recipient of the W.K. Rose Fellowship for Emerging Artists, the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award for non-fiction writing, and the Seattle Review Prize for fiction. Miracle Girls is her first novel. Pretend I'm Your Friend is her second collection of stories. A Cheerleader's Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment is her new memoir in essays.

Reviews

[Stacia · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5* - I wanted to love it. I was super excited to order it but when I sat down to read it, I was disappointed.

The main reason I was interested in this book is because it's "entwined short stories" - which is what I'm currently writing. I've read a few connected collections and the level of entanglement varies in each. This one was so subtle, I completely missed it until I was about three stories from the end and started scanning backwards for repeated names. That's not my gripe - I would've liked it to be a little more obvious but that may have been my failure for reading it over a longer period of time. I still enjoyed it once I saw the connections.

My issue was more that I didn't care for the content and I never strongly connected with any of the characters. The blurb says it's about "fear, loss, and pain of love, sex, and family life" but most often, it was about sex. I'm no prude, but the way relationships (or lack of) were presented, the stories usually felt too emotionally distant for me to really get behind them.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful story collection. I wouldn't say the stories are linked so much as some characters reappear. It's subtle. And more often than not, joyous, even in sorrow. Characters are believable. Most are women, a few are lesbian. All, including the men, are very human - a triumph of Caschetta's skill.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the continuity of these short stories -- they all did call backs in one way or another! I particularly liked how the self-image of characters conflicted with the image other characters had of them. That was very realistic to our everyday lives, and in this case, it definitely muddled up my feelings for some characters. That made this a great read.

[Mari Robles · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book was random but at the same time intertwined, it was alright but not a book I would recommend. U have to know ahead of time that most of the characters will pop up again in other mini stories

[Masha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not sure what I expected. If it wasn't for the fact that characters were connected in various stories, I'd prob give it a 1.

[Gloria · Rating 3 out of 5]

God, another book that makes me strongly wish Goodreads allowed half star ratings. This is a solid 3.5 star book. Even 3.7. Just not quite 4 stars. I'm not really sure why. I guess the short stories feel incomplete, some of them, which are the type of short story that frustrate me most. Just as I'm getting into them, attached to and interested in the characters, they just end. That style of story is just not my favorite. I think you can have a story that's still short, but has an ending, that says a lot, that contains different emotions and feels... full and complete. Some of these stories were SO good, it just seemed abrupt the way they ended. I don't know. It bothered me.

[Hazel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written stories, lively characters, a great read.

[Sally Bellerose · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author is my real life friend and I love the book. She knows how to tell great stories about messy lives. And linked short stories - my favorite!

[John Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read based on a review I read....not as interesting a read as I was lead to believe. Some of the short stories do stand out on their on.

[Tracy Robertson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked most of the stories a lot, and I loved how I thought I'd seen the last of a character, but they would pop up again in a later story. Sorry Mrs. Robinson was one of my favorites and I wished it was longer, and to learn more about Mrs. Robinson and her daughters, so when they popped up again in a later story it was an unexpected surprise. I wasn't really feeling the last story very much, but overall a great collection and I will have to investigate the authors other work.