“The perfect book to read with your friends.” —Bustle “The debut novel of the season, The Other’s Gold reads like an origin story for the women of Big Little Lies.” —ElleAn insightful and sparkling novel that opens on a college campus and follows the friendship of four women across life-defining turning pointsAssigned to the same suite during their freshman year at Quincy-Hawthorn College, … points
Assigned to the same suite during their freshman year at Quincy-Hawthorn College, Lainey, Ji Sun, Alice, and Margaret quickly become inseparable. The leafy green campus they move through together, the idyllic window seat they share in their suite, and the passion and ferocity that school and independence awakens in them ignites an all-encompassing love with one another. But they soon find their bonds–forged in joy, and fused by fear–must weather threats that originate from beyond the dark forests of their childhoods, and come at them from institutions, from one another, and ultimately, from within themselves.
The Other’s Gold follows the four friends as each makes a terrible mistake, moving from their wild college days to their more feral days as new parents. With one part devoted to each mistake–the Accident, the Accusation, the Kiss, and the Bite–this complex yet compulsively readable debut interrogates the way that growing up forces our friendships to evolve as the women discover what they and their loved ones are capable of, and capable of forgiving. A joyful, big-hearted book that perfectly evokes the bittersweet experience of falling in love with friendship, the experiences of Lainey, Ji Sun, Alice, and Margaret are at once achingly familiar and yet shine with a brilliance and depth all their own.
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A sharply-drawn portrait of a lifelong friendship, The Other’s Gold follows four young women bearing past traumas and navigating unimagined futures. With an uncanny eye for detail, Elizabeth Ames charts the complex, ever-shifting topography of this ‘chosen family’ — and illuminates the ways our closest friends sustain us over the course of our lives.
I’d been meaning to read this one for along time but unfortunately it left me a little cold. ‘The Other’s Gold’ by Elizabeth Ames tells the story of four friends, Alice, Ji Sun, Margaret and Lainey, who meet in college and become lifelong friends. The novel follows them through college, early adulthood, marriage and motherhood. The narrative of the novel is centred around the worst mistakes that each of the women makes over the course of their lives. For Alice; an accident in her childhood, for Ji Sun; an accusation she makes while at university, for Margaret; a disturbing kiss and for Lainey; a bite from seemingly out of the blue. My main issue with this book is it raised a lot of very serious issues (childhood sexual abuse, postpartum mental illness and infidelity among others) but the author didn’t seem to know what to do with this issues once they’d been raised. I felt the novel stopped in a weird place and left a lot of unresolved issues and questions for the reader. Perhaps this was intentional on the author’s part, but I would have liked a bit more resolution and clarity to this story, particularly regarding Margaret’s ‘mistake’.
I love coming of age stories about discovering yourself. Plus there’s romance!
Thank you to Viking and Penguin Random House for this copy in exchange for my honest review.
Margaret, Ji Sun, Alice and Lainey meet as freshman suite mates at Quincy-Hawthorne College and immediately become best friends. Though they all come from different backgrounds, they form a bond that other students look at with envy. As boyfriends and girlfriends come and go, their friendship remains constant.
Over the years, from college to marriages to children, their friendships weather various storms. Their relationships change with some growing closer and others having tension but these bonds are always changing. Each woman has a “mistake” in their life, Alice’s from before college, Ji Sun’s during and Margaret and Lainey’s in the years after. Their mistakes – the Accident, the Accusation, the Kiss and the Bite – shake the foundation of their friendships.
This book is a beautiful celebration of the power of friendship. It explores how women can accept, support and love each other, even when horrible acts are committed. These four women struggle at times to understand how their friends could behave in such ways and whether these acts define the women or change the others’ opinions of them. Should one mistake define a person? Does learning about your friend’s worst moment cancel everything good you know about her?
The characters are richly developed and their stories are relatable and believable. The women have a friendship that most would envy due to the fact that they always find their way back to each other, even after life takes them in unexpected directions. I found myself wondering if I could accept these mistakes in my own friends while hoping I could be as understanding and supportive as the characters. The Other’s Gold would be a phenomenal book club book as there are so many great discussions that spring from it. It explores the idea that people are more than their worst moment and that good people can do awful things. It would be fascinating to examine their mistakes, their behavior afterwards and discuss whether any of their actions are unforgivable in a friend. This book is beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time.
This debut by Elizabeth Ames centers around the intense friendship of four women who meet when they room together during their freshman year of college and continue to do so until they graduate. In many ways a coming-of age novel, it follows them separately and as a group through the marriages of three of them and births/adoptions of their various children. The story focus is on a pivotal flaw or mistake each makes, a character-shaping, defining or revealing moment and the combination of judgment, support, and forgiveness that she receives from the others. They are each other’s chosen family and guard these family secrets fiercely.
A sprawling novel, my sense is that many will love it and find it riveting.The characters do reflect the self-absorption of the young which some may find off-putting, but the author has depicted it with sensitivity and skill. I think readers will react strongly one way or the other. Richly detailed, with beautifully defined characters and lovely, crafted writing, it has a page-turning quality that reminds me a bit of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.
One of the most immersive, unsettling books I’ve read in a long, long time. For hours after I finished it, the book felt realer to me than my own life did. There is something almost painful about how close we get to these characters: Ames observes them with a kind of ardent incision that at times feels like watching someone perform open-heart surgery, and at other times feels like having open-heart surgery performed on you. I was devastated by it. I loved it.
Reading Elizabeth Ames’s The Other’s Gold is like sinking into a lucid dream, wonderful and unsettling in turns, surreally beautiful throughout. As we follow four friends through university and beyond, into the messy miasma of life, we feel as if we are growing into adulthood, into womanhood, with her characters. We feel every bruise, every elation, in part because Ames writes in language that is feverish and refined, with equal parts tenderness and ruthlessness. That her writing can do all this at once is incredible. Read her, and you will be richer for it.