NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICKAn insightful, hilarious, and compulsively readable novel about a complicated friendship between two women who are at two very different stages in life, from the bestselling author of Maine and Saints for All Occasions.Elisabeth, an accomplished journalist and new mother, is struggling to adjust to life in a small town after … 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.
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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.
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.
Didn’t care for it.
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.
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.
3.5 stars
As I read this book, I’d find myself wondering if I liked it because of its story and characters or if I liked it because J. Courtney Sullivan wrote it. Was I projecting my enjoyment of Sullivan’s books onto this one, undeservedly so?
I think part of my dilemma is due to having read Such a Fun Age several weeks ago. It’s easy to compare the two, although Kiley Reid’s book is, I believe, more enjoyable and approachable. You have wealthy (white) women forging relationships with their babysitters. In this case, Elisabeth, an author working on a new novel, moved 250 miles away from her beloved New York City because of something to do with an invention her husband is working on, which also puts her closer to her in-laws. She hires Sam, a local college student, to take care of her baby boy.
Elisabeth is problematic because nearly all of her blows are self-inflicted, and yet you’re left wondering if she learned anything. She is completely oblivious to her privilege, and that doesn’t change. Sam, meanwhile, frustrates as well. That she stays with her loser British boyfriend makes you question her ability to grow. I get it, in a way. When I was in my early twenties, I tended to try to stick with men who were toxic, but Sam is presented as more prescient and not nearly as silly as I was.
My biggest complaint about this book is probably due more to its publisher than Sullivan. The book jacket leads you to expect “devastating consequences” due to Sam’s friendship with Elisabeth’s father-in-law. Either those “devastating consequences” were cut out during the revision process or the blurb writer read a different book. The consequences are not devastating in the least. Rather, they are almost uplifting.
I had a long inner debate on what rating to give this book. Three stars? Four? I kept circling back to its being well written, which it is. Let’s face it, though: J. Courtney Sullivan is a talented writer. Even at her weakest (Elisabeth’s character development), she tells a compelling tale. It comes down to Elisabeth’s lack of growth. She enters this book someone resolutely opposed to allowing her new neighbors into her life, and she ends it reluctantly wondering if she will always be a snob. Are we supposed to believe that she has learned from her mistakes because she invites her neighbors to her son’s birthday party?
If you read this one, I’d love to know your thoughts.