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J. Courtney Sullivan

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Friends and Strangers: A novel

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Friends and Strangers: A novel (A Read with Jenna Pick) Kindle Edition

by J. Courtney Sullivan (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.1 4,400 ratings

Editors' pick Best Literature & Fiction

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK • An insightful and compulsively readable novel about a complicated friendship between two women who are at two very different stages in life, from the best-selling author of Maine and Saints for All Occasions.

"Once again, Sullivan has shown herself to be one of the wisest and least pretentious chroniclers of modern life."—The Washington Post

Elisabeth, an accomplished journalist and new mother, is struggling to adjust to life in a small town after nearly twenty years in New York City. Alone in the house with her infant son all day (and awake with him much of the night), she feels uneasy, adrift. She neglects her work, losing untold hours to her Brooklyn moms' Facebook group, her "influencer" sister's Instagram feed, and text messages with the best friend she never sees anymore. Enter Sam, a senior at the local women's college, whom Elisabeth hires to babysit. Sam is struggling to decide between the path she's always planned on and a romantic entanglement that threatens her ambition. She's worried about student loan debt and what the future holds. In short order, they grow close. But when Sam finds an unlikely kindred spirit in Elisabeth's father-in-law, the true differences between the women's lives become starkly revealed and a betrayal has devastating consequences.

A masterful exploration of motherhood, power dynamics, and privilege in its many forms, Friends and Strangers reveals how a single year can shape the course of a life.

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of July 2020: This well-drawn domestic drama explores with verve and an almost scientific rigor how friendships form, especially across generational and socio-economic lines. Elisabeth, an accomplished author, slips into suburban malaise after having a baby and moving from New York City to Philadelphia where she hires Sam, a self-possessed college senior, to babysit. Their relationship quickly gets complicated as Sam makes her way into Elisabeth’s world. The author charts with uncommon grace how we ‘pick’ people, that alchemical interplay of surprise and familiarity, esteem and envy, that makes us curious to know more. As the book cups hands around those first embers of connection, it’s hypnotic to watch the spark float into the open waters of real friendship where characters are as likely to be capsized by good intentions as unexpected consequences. —Katy Ball

Review

A #ReadWithJenna TODAY Show Book Club Pick

An Amazon "Best Book of 2020"
A Washington Post "Book to Read this Summer"
A Real Simple "Best Book of 2020"
An Entertainment Weekly "Book to Read this June"
A Parade "Best Book of the Summer"
A theSkimm "Hottest Book of the Summer"
A Vogue "Book to Read this June"
A People magazine "Best Book to Read this Summer"
A Good Housekeeping "Best Beach Read"
A Marie Claire "Best New Book to Read this Summer"
A Bustle "Most Anticipated Book of 2020"
A SheReads "Most Anticipated Book of 2020"
A RealSimple "Top Pick for Summer"
A Travel and Leisure "Most Anticipated Book of the Summer"
A Parade "Best Beach Read of 2020"
A Good Morning America "Book to Read This Summer"
A Town and Country "Must-Read Book of the Summer"
A New York Times "Book to Watch For"
A CNN "Perfect Summer Read'

"J. Courtney Sullivan’s fifth novel, which examines the intricate relationship between a babysitter and her employer, begins in the middle of the night, in the middle of the suburbs — 'Nobody up at this hour besides mothers and insomniacs' — from which promising vantage point we’re given delightful permission to sit back and spy... Drawn by Sullivan’s deft hand, the relationship feels authentic and richly textured... Friends and Strangers is a big novel with big ideas... An honest rendering of what happens behind closed doors."
—Clare Lombardo, New York Times Book Review

"There’s a rare degree of emotional maturity in Friends and Strangers, a willingness to resist demonizing any of the players, a commitment to exploring the demands of family with the deliberate care such complex relations require. Once again, Sullivan has shown herself to be one of the wisest and least pretentious chroniclers of modern life. Every hard-won insight here is offered up with such casual grace."
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Friends and Strangers is a compellingly readable book that feels a little bit like a beach read, but at the same time tackles themes of acceptance of others and also of yourself... The novel takes on modern issues surrounding adulthood, motherhood and class. It also offers a broader look at issues we are facing as an American society... as hilarious as it is insightful and paints an authentic picture of modern motherhood and the power of female friendship."
—Today

“What's crucial about... Friends and Strangers, though, is that they are more than "nanny novels" predicated on a Manichaean dynamic between employer and employee. They expertly lay bare the shortcomings of the employers they represent, but they allow them humanity too: These mothers are lost, isolated and often have no one else to whom they feel they can turn other than their nannies. More importantly, while these books center the young women who have been transported into unfamiliar and luxe surroundings under the auspices of caregiving, they take care to define their protagonists by more than their work.”
—Vogue

"Courtney Sullivan’s new Friends and Strangers... fits neatly into my preferred category of summer reading: literate and smart, but also a heck of a lot of fun and a break for my news-addled brain... a gimlet-eyed examination of classism and privilege in America and a close look at the complicated terrain between parents and hired caregivers, with the ensuing guilt and resentments that so often accompany such relationships."
—Portland Monthly

"Extremely timely."
—New York Post

"One of summer's most delicious reads."
—Town and Country

"A hilarious and insightful novel about a complicated friendship between two very different women... When their differences are revealed, a betrayal takes place with devastating consequences."
—SheReads

"You’ll like this one... a modern look at power dynamics, privilege, and motherhood, and is one you’ll be seeing all over Insta."
—TheSkimm

"The clash between rich and poor animates Friends and Strangers, J. Courtney Sullivan’s quietly perceptive new novel about two women on different sides of America’s economic divide: a new mother and the college-age nanny she hires for her son... Friends and Strangers is at its best when Sullivan emphasizes the widening class difference in America between people who can afford $46 peony-scented hand soaps and those worried about meeting basic needs. Sullivan dares to further complicate her narrative by showing that financial security doesn’t guarantee happiness. The result is a poignant look at the biases of modern society."
—BookPage

"Sullivan’s writing is captivating and witty as the characters observe the disconnects in their respective lives and those around them."
—New Canaan Advertiser

"Courtney Sullivan's Friends and Strangers exposes fraught truths about power dynamics, class, and privilege."
—Marie Claire

"This new novel from the author of Saints for All Occasions looks at how our locations, both geographic and where we are in life, can take their toll, and delivers what promises to be one of summer's most delicious reads.”
—Town and Country

"Sullivan... once again displays her keen observation skills with this insightful examination of two women at very different places in their lives. With well-developed, very real-feeling characters the story moves seamlessly from one perspective to the other. Friends and Strangers is a deeply personal yet profound exploration of motherhood, friendships, and the role of privilege in determining how we shape our lives."
—Booklist

"Readers should jettison any expectation they have for the book--fish-out-of-water story, manipulative-nanny chiller, send-up of campus culture. J. Courtney Sullivan's fifth novel offers something more interesting... Friends and Strangers is about whether the unfairness of privilege can ever be sufficiently offset by good deeds. And what of bad deeds: Are they forgiven if they result from good intentions?... . Sullivan massages her themes in scenes as barbed as they are funny, by way of characters as infuriating as they are heartbreaking."
—Shelf Awareness

"Sullivan... writes with empathy for her characters even as she reveals their flaws and shortcomings. And while the story she tells focuses primarily on two women from different backgrounds and at different stages of life, it also illuminates broader issues about money, privilege, and class; marriage, family, and friendship; and the dueling demands of career and domesticity with which many women struggle. This perceptive novel about a complex friendship between two women resonates as broadly as it does deeply."
—Kirkus, starred

"Sullivan’s intimate, incisive latest explores the evolving friendship between a new mother and her babysitter... Readers will be captivated by Sullivan’s authentic portrait of modern motherhood."
—Publishers Weekly

“Friends and Strangers is a smart and deeply compelling exploration of female friendship and the complicated politics of motherhood and childcare. J. Courtney Sullivan is a shrewd and sympathetic observer of our current cultural moment, with an unerring eye for the way that the unspoken realities of money and class can affect even our most intimate relationships.”
—Tom Perrotta, best-selling author of The Leftovers

“J. Courtney Sullivan is one of our great literary treasures, and Friends and Strangers is permeated with her brilliance and heart. The novel is a captivating, wise, laugh-out-loud-funny story about the life-changing friendship between Elisabeth, a new mom, and Sam, her college-age babysitter. I loved this novel from the first word to the last."
—Ann Napolitano, best-selling author of Dear Edward

“I have long been a fan of J. Courtney Sullivan's insightful and rich novels—Friends and Strangers is her best yet! Sullivan has a stunning ability to capture the tenderness and frailty of human relationships. Her newest is a poignant, wise, big-hearted novel full of complicated women doing their best and striving to do better. I loved it.”
—Taylor Jenkins Reid, best-selling author of Daisy Jones & The Six

“J. Courtney Sullivan is a writer of extraordinary gifts, and this is her most affecting book yet, which I just wanted to keep reading and reading straight through to its climactic and emotional last pages, because its world felt completely realized, and completely real. Sullivan is a writer who offers up small human moments and large social ones, all within the frame of a truly good story. I loved it.”
—Meg Wolitzer, best-selling author of The Female Persuasion

About the Author

J. Courtney Sullivan is the New York Times best-selling author of the novels Commencement, Maine, The Engagements, and Saints For All Occasions. Her work has been translated into 17 languages. Sullivan's writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, New York magazine, Elle, Glamour, Allure, Real Simple, and O: The Oprah Magazine, among many others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Elisabeth

She awakened to silence. Nobody up at this hour besides mothers and insomniacs. She did not need to look at the clock to know that within seconds the baby would cry, and she would lift him from his bassinet before her eyes were quite open, exhaustion giving way to acceptance, devotion, as she held the warm heft of him in her arms.

A flash of hot rage sparked in her at the sight of her sleeping husband, but just as quickly it was gone, and she was changing the diaper, walking downstairs, wondering what would happen if she dropped the baby, if he died. The answer as familiar as the question: she would go out a window. That settled, Elisabeth kissed the top of his head.

A video affirmation she had found online began, in soothing tones, Every time I nurse my child, I drink a glass of water. In this way, I remember that I too deserve care. Filling a glass of water required more than she had at the moment, but she thought it was good enough that she knew she ought to.

In the living room, her eyes adjusted. She saw the black and blue shadows of the glass-and-gold coffee table with which she would soon have to part, the pair of armchairs, the potted fiddle-leaf fig tree, seven feet tall. She had arranged these items in the exact configuration they had occupied in the Brooklyn apartment, but somehow it all looked different here.

Elisabeth reached under the sofa and pulled out the ugly pillow with the stupid name. My Brest Friend. Someone, she couldn’t remember who, had given it to her as a shower gift, swearing that it was a godsend. This turned out to be true, even though she felt like she was wearing a life preserver around her waist whenever she put it on.

She sat down, laying the baby across her padded lap. She lifted her T-shirt, unhooked her bra. He latched on and began to suck, an easy rhythm that had seemed impossible four months ago. In order to be discharged from the hospital after giving birth, she was required to attend an hour-long class about breastfeeding. The entire time, Elisabeth kept falling asleep, waking when her head slammed against the wall behind her.

She held her phone aloft in one hand now, above the baby’s head, and used her thumb to navigate to Facebook. Straight to the BK Mamas page, as usual. Elisabeth scrolled until she came to the place where she’d left off before bed. The page buzzed with questions from mothers at all hours. They kept one another company there. She imagined the rows of brownstones in the old neighborhood, bathed in blackness but for the tiny screens, lit up, connecting them all.

There was a post from a woman looking for tips on flying cross-country with a toddler. Elisabeth read all thirteen responses with interest, even though she didn’t have a toddler or plans to fly anytime soon. Someone was asking about the flu shot. Someone else needed a unicorn birthday cake on short notice. Mimi Winchester, who had recently purchased a townhouse for three million, was selling a used boy’s coat, size 2T, for nine dollars.

Elisabeth had once mocked women like this—women who graduated from prestigious universities and excelled in their chosen fields, only to be felled by the prospect of clipping a newborn’s fingernails. Now they were her survival. The only people alive who cared about the exact things she did at this moment, with as much intensity, the people with all the answers. They were learning an evolving language, one you spoke for a week or two before everything changed again. What else to do with that accrued knowledge but share it. Someone with a child six weeks older than hers was a prophet.

She switched sides after ten minutes.

A new post popped up.

Slightly off topic, but . . . last month, as usual, my husband was a no-show on a visit to my parents in Minneapolis. While I was there, I ran into my college boyfriend, recently divorced. Now we’re texting at all hours. Is this an emotional affair? Am I supposed to stop? Because dammit, it’s FUN, and I think I deserve some fun.

In her profile picture, the woman was blonde and smiling and toned, a tall guy’s arms wrapped around her. They stood on a white sand beach, palm trees in the distance. Their honeymoon, maybe. Half the women still used their wedding photos, including, Elisabeth had noticed, the ones who complained most about their useless husbands.

The secrets they divulged to one another amazed her. The group was marked Private, but that only meant that you had to ask to join. There were 4,237 members, and in theory at least, most of them lived within twenty blocks of one another. Yet it felt like a safe space. At once intimate and anonymous.

The same fifteen women commented on everything, each with her own predictable slant on the issue of the day.

When someone asked about whether to have a third kid, the self-righteous environmentalist said that she had not done so because of fears about global warming and her family’s carbon footprint; someone posted an easy chicken recipe, and the Environmentalist wrote a manifesto in the comments section about why she was raising her kids vegan.

Mimi Winchester managed to complain about her brownstone (she’d kill for open concept), her cleaning lady (she wouldn’t do windows), and even, somehow, her Hamptons house (traffic!).

The nanny tattlers loved to report on sitters they saw feeding a child junk food or talking on the phone to a degree they deemed excessive. There were also those who stood up for any nanny’s behavior, no matter how terrible.

Elisabeth’s best friend, Nomi, said her greatest source of irritation was the friends who didn’t come to them with problems but instead posted them to the BK Mamas page. Last spring, their college friend Tanya, who also lived in the neighborhood, spent an entire dinner making small talk, only to post to BK Mamas two days later that she was on the hunt for a divorce attorney.

“I’m not acknowledging it unless she tells me directly,” Nomi said.

“I think she assumes you’ll see it on Facebook and then ask her about it,” Elisabeth said.

“Well, I won’t.”

Elisabeth, like most people, was a lurker, rarely commenting, never posting, despite the time she spent reading the page each day.

Within five minutes, twelve women said that what the smiling blonde was up to with her college boyfriend was nothing but a harmless flirtation. Ten others said to cut it off immediately.

This sort of question appeared once a month or so, standing out among so many queries about potty training and playgroups. Someone would confess a husband’s alcoholism or infidelity, or a disturbing desire to run away, and everyone else would reply in a rush, energized by being in possession of a secret.

They were the posts Elisabeth told Andrew about the next morning, even though she knew he didn’t care. Half the pleasure of the group was talking about it with someone in real life. She missed Wednesdays in Brooklyn, when Nomi worked from home and would meet her at the crepe place on Court Street for lunch.

She kept revisiting their last lunch in her mind. How they sat and talked, both unwilling to end the conversation, until the kid behind the counter said it was closing time. Then they lingered on the sidewalk in the sticky August heat, as they had done in the parking lot on the day they left college.

Nomi once swore she’d never live in Brooklyn. The first time she came out from Manhattan for brunch, just before she climbed into a taxi, she swept her hand across Elisabeth’s forehead like Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were and said, “Your borough is lovely, Hubbell.” But it was another two years before she and Brian moved. They bought a three-bedroom in a new high-rise with an elevator and a swimming pool. Elisabeth had only ever lived in dusty walk-ups, with crown moldings and creaky wooden floors. Places that were listed as having character and charm, if not central air or laundry in the building.

She attributed the longevity of their friendship at least in part to the fact that she and Nomi had opposite tastes in men and real estate. It was impossible for either of them to be jealous of the other.

“Am I making a huge mistake?” Elisabeth said as they parted, locked in a hug, the baby asleep in the stroller at her side.

“Yes,” Nomi said. “You are.”

“That is not a supportive answer.”

“I’m still mad at you for leaving.”

“I always said I was going to.”

“But you’d been saying it for so long, I stopped believing you at some point.”

Elisabeth had been so lucky to have the friend who knew her best right nearby, all that time.

She supposed this was another reason why she clung to a neighborhood Facebook group—it made her forget that she lived 250 miles away now, in a town where she had no friends.

I’m your friend, Andrew said.

Husbands don’t count.

He hadn’t made friends either, but he at least had coworkers and the odd amusing story to tell.

Most days, Elisabeth took Gil for a walk after lunch and passed a playground where mothers stood in a cluster, gossiping, laughing.

Jesus, you’re not the new kid at middle school, she chided herself. Go over and say hello.

They were grown women. They had to be nice, at least to her face. But she couldn’t do it. Some mix of self-consciousness and fatigue stopped her. That, and the fear that she wouldn’t like them anyway.

Even as she talked herself out of wanting to know them, she hoped they might notice her and wave her over, but they never did.

The baby drank himself drunk and closed his eyes, his head an anchor seeking the bottom. Elisabeth carried him upstairs and lowered him gently, deliberately, into the bassinet, as if he was a bomb that might detonate if handled improperly.

In the hours before he woke again, she lay in bed unable to sleep. She knew she should find a way, that the day would be hectic. An interview with a potential babysitter, emails to answer, those stretches of time with an infant that got eaten up by she couldn’t say what. But she kept looking at the phone, eager to see how the BK Mamas were weighing in on the blonde woman’s emotional affair.

Violet, her therapist, would say that Elisabeth was trying to distract herself—from the secret she was keeping from her husband, from her father-in-law’s recent struggles, and from her relationship with her own parents, which had always been a mess, but had become more painful of late.

Elisabeth had gone to see Violet in the first place with no intention of returning week after week. She wanted someone to tell her she was clinically depressed, or anxious, or else that her worries, her spinning thoughts, could be explained by a protein deficiency. She wanted a clear diagnosis and a simple treatment she could buy at a pharmacy or a health-food store and feel working immediately.

That is so not how therapy works, Nomi said.

“Postpartum depression is real,” Violet said.

“I know it is, but no,” Elisabeth said. “I’ve always been like this.”

She was only addressing it now because of Gil. She had an urge to fix herself before he became aware of all the ways in which she was broken.

Violet said to remember that thoughts are vapor. She said to read Eckhart Tolle.

When Elisabeth googled Violet, she came across an essay she’d written years earlier for an anthology about mothers and daughters, so she knew that Violet had no children, that her mother had died, that her dear old father was lost to Alzheimer’s.

Sometimes, when she complained about her family during a session, Elisabeth wondered if Violet was suppressing an urge to scream, My perfect mother dies, my dad doesn’t know who I am, while your shitty parents go on and on. How is this fair?

Violet yawned a lot, which hurt Elisabeth’s feelings.

Her eyes opened. She woke up. This was how Elisabeth could be certain she had slept. For ten minutes? An hour? Impossible to say.

It was five o’clock in the morning. In a moment, the baby would wake. She wondered how long their bodies would remain in sync like this, hers anticipating what his was about to do.

She checked BK Mamas on her phone while she waited.

A woman named Heather had posted around four, asking if, after two glasses of wine, it was necessary to pump and dump. The replies came swift, a resounding chorus of nos. Heather thanked them, then admitted that she was feeling guilty. About not getting enough vitamins, about having an Oreo when she had sworn to eat organic for the baby’s sake.

Guilt was their common bond.

Stop overthinking it, someone wrote. Multivariate regression analysis on the impact of that Oreo is a dangerous path.

Elisabeth considered this, amused.

The baby cried. The day began.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0818YFS4L
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (June 30, 2020)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 30, 2020
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2402 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 484 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #157,836 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,109 in Coming of Age Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #2,267 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- #3,264 in Family Life Fiction (Books)

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J. Courtney Sullivan

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J. Courtney Sullivan is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Commencement, Maine, The Engagements, and Saints For All Occasions. Her fifth novel, Friends and Strangers, will be published in June 2020.

Maine was named a Best Book of the Year by Time magazine, and a Washington Post Notable Book for 2011. The Engagements was one of People Magazine’s Top Ten Books of 2013 and an Irish Times Best Book of the Year. It is soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon and distributed by Fox 2000, and it will be translated into 17 languages. Saints For All Occasions was named one of the ten best books of the year by the Washington Post, a New York Times Critic’s Pick for 2017, and a New England Book Award nominee.

Courtney’s writing has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, New York magazine, Elle, Glamour, Allure, Real Simple, and O: The Oprah Magazine, among many others. She is a co-editor, with Courtney Martin, of the essay anthology Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists. In 2017, she wrote the forewords to new editions of two of her favorite children’s books: Anne of Green Gables and Little Women.

A Massachusetts native, Courtney now lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.

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Susan M. Baumann

Superb Storytelling

Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2020

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Loved this book! Elisabeth and her husband, Andrew, leave New York to move to a college town to be closer to Andrew’s parents. Adrift and untethered in her new quieter community, Elisabeth struggles to adjust to new motherhood, the neighborhood and making new friends. She’s anxious to publish her third book and needs a part-time babysitter for their son, Gil.
Sam is a senior at the college, in need of extra cash to cover her expenses. She responds to Elisabeth’s babysitting inquiry on the campus bulletin board. She’s immediately taken with Gil, and Elisabeth and Sam quickly establish an easy rapport. Elisabeth welcomes the company. Sullivan does an excellent job of creating both of these main characters. If you like character-driven novels, this one does not disappoint. Sullivan takes her time shaping and sharpening these two women. They are so finely and completely articulated that each could step off the page and slip into the world. In fact, all of the characters are so well-developed. I appreciate when a writer takes the time to expertly craft believable, interesting characters that the reader wants to know. We learn that thirtysomething Elizabeth is wrestling with fertility issues and whether to have another child. Sam is nearing college graduation, juggling doubts and conflicting feelings regarding her older, British boyfriend, Clive. The story unfolds gradually and the reader gets slice-of-life snapshots of both women, as they spend time with various friends, family dramas and deciding what their next steps will be. Both are at a crossroad in their lives and trying to do what they think is best. The bond deepens between Elisabeth and Sam, more mentor/friend than employer/caregiver. The story arc/plot happens relatively late in the book. This will frustrate some, and not bother others. I was so caught up in the richly textured writing and enveloping inner dialogues of the characters, that it wasn’t an issue. Then, Sam and Elisabeth have a sudden unforeseen falling out, with devastating consequences. For me, the book was about the complicated, complex and intricately tangled relationships that often exist between women, bonds that are both strong and quite fragile as well. It’s a wonderful story about the people who enter our lives, and how that landscape can change so abruptly and unexpectedly. The book is funny, warm, relatable, sometimes frustrating and also wistful. Such a great read!

2 people found this helpful

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M. Goggans

Excellent book-I give it 4.5 stars!

Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2020

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I bought this book because there has been a lot of buzz around it my book clubs. I ended up reading it over the course of a single day-an afternoon, really-and it absorbed all of my attention for that time.

Friends and Strangers is a good book-a really good book. I am in my mid-thirties and this book seemed like it had been written about people that I know. I have a lot in common with the characters in the book. Like Sam, I attended an all-women's college. Like Elisabeth, I found a mom's group online that has been the solid support system since I had my first baby 8 years ago. Sam reminded me of a younger version of me, and Elisabeth is living a life parallel to where I am now. I found much of the book very relatable and that is a testament to the author's skill.

The storyline of the book is not really just one storyline-it's several threads that are all woven together. There's Sam's long-distance relationship with an older man, Elisabeth's estranged relationships with her family, the marital tension over money and the questions of whether to have more children, the prospect of Elisabeth's in-laws losing their house as the job market has made her father-in-law's company obsolete, plus much more. At times I couldn't figure out where the story was going and then I realized it's not that kind of book...everything didn't come all together perfectly by the end. Also, the book packs in a lot of observations about modern-day life. Some of the observations are one-offs (such as the pressure for new moms about breastfeeding at all costs) and others are themes that occur throughout the book (the Hollow Tree stuff, observations about different kinds of privilege, etc.). I do think that these subtle commentaries make the book seem very modern at the moment, but they may not stand the test of time. Post-pandemic, our world is going to look very different.

I did find Elisabeth's character to be a little off-putting. She makes a couple of decisions that are just...bad. Really bad and immature since she didn't think to consult her husband Andrew about these huge, life-altering decisions that she made (either before or immediately after). That left a bad taste in my mouth about her...Elisabeth is definitely not an aspirational character who has her adult life all figured out.

Sam, to me, was the more likable of the two women. For one thing, she is much younger and her naivete is believable. For another, she learns some hard truths about the world over the course of the book and she matures.

My only complaint (and the reason I give the book 4.5 stars and not 5) is that only Sam got a voice in the epilogue. I had some questions about Elisabeth's life 10 years into the future and their run-in at a traffic light didn't give me enough answers.

I definitely recommend this book-it's smart, it's thought-provoking, and it's an enjoyable read!

21 people found this helpful

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Scout

FRIENDS AND STRANGERS

Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2020

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First book I’ve read by this author. A lot of hype because of it being Jenna Bush Hager’s July book of the month. This is the first hardback book that I’ve purchased in a long time. I was swayed by the reviews that touted....” An insightful, hilarious, and compulsively readable novel...”
Unfortunately, it was not....an insightful, hilarious, and compulsively readable novel. It was just okay.

6 people found this helpful

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xaperlu

Livre en anglais

Reviewed in France on October 28, 2023

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Northern Rockies

I love this book

Reviewed in Canada on August 12, 2020

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This was a very well-written, engaging book. This author is very skilled, which is such a breath of fresh air in today’s literary world. I loved this book.

Gvk

Bestseller??

Reviewed in Canada on December 2, 2021

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This book is so boring...just don't waste your time!

Sophia Blackwell

Lovely human story of a life-changing friendship

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 25, 2021

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Friends and Strangers explores the relationship between Elisabeth, a writer who comes from money and has just had her first child, and her gentle, naive childminder Sam, who comes from a working-class background. The BK (Brooklyn) Mamas Facebook page was a hilarious highlight and I loved the heroine's sister Charlotte, an appalling influencer who commits every social media sin under the sun. Most of the social events in the Mamas’ world are doomed and increasingly awkward, leading to hilarity and making me think that this would also be a lovely Netflix series in the style of Working Moms or The Girlfriend's Guide to Divorce – I know I’d watch it!

3 people found this helpful

TeeBrad

Never gets going

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 15, 2023

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Unfortunately, despite the writing being good enough to stop me giving up on this before the end, I was a bit annoyed I stuck with it. There's nothing to get invested in. The characters are one dimensional and predictable, so you don't really care what happens to them. Nothing much does. I was bored of them by the time I got to the middle of the book. Disappointing.

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Friends and Strangers: A novel

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