When We Were Friends by Nancy Yeager

EXCERPT: Frannie Willets drove north on Indiana State Road 3, hoping for a sinkhole, a spring flood, a twenty-car pileup, anything to keep her from the reunion with her ex-best friend.

ABOUT ‘WHEN WE WERE FRIENDS’: They were best friends. Sisters of the heart. Partners in crime. Until they got caught…

Five years ago, Frannie Willets committed grand larceny to help her best friend, Lexi Maddox, escape an awful situation. Now paroled and prospectless, Frannie needs to disappear from her dead-end life. To do so, she’ll need her share of the stolen money that Lexi has been hiding all these years. But Lexi has other plans.

By all appearances, Lexi is thriving, but in truth, nothing in her life is going according to plan. She can’t carry a pregnancy to term, her sweet stepdaughter hates her, and even the family’s new rescue dog knows she’s a failure. Lexi’s only path to happiness is making amends with the friend she dearly misses. But the only thing Frannie wants from Lexi is cash.

Out of desperation, Lexi offers Frannie all the money, with one catch: Frannie must stick around for one month. Stranded in their suffocating small town, Frannie gets tangled up in Lexi’s issues, her mother’s questionable dating life, a lonely kid’s desperate attempts to find friends, and a high-school crush’s fantasies about what could have been. Suddenly, leaving doesn’t look as easy as it once did. But when an old enemy surfaces, Frannie realizes her staying endangers everyone she loves. And even though she might have found her heart’s true home, there’s no guarantee she can keep it.

MY THOUGHTS: When We Were Friends grabbed my interest at the start, and other than the odd one or two moments where it wavered, never completely let me go.

Frannie and Lexi were the sort of friends who were inseparable as kids. They had a shared love of books and reading that set them apart from the other girls in their class. They stayed close right up to college when circumstances sent them in different directions. But when Lexi finds herself in a situation she can’t handle alone, it’s Frannie she turns to for help.

I enjoyed the way the timelines alternated between the present day and the past, so that the friends’ backstory is slowly revealed. Each woman, as an adult, is capable of being manipulative to get what she wants, and each is fragile in her own way. The problem is, what each woman wants is vastly different to the other.

I’m ambivalent about the romance element of this story. It just didn’t sit quite right with me, and yet Seth was necessary to the storyline. There are a couple of sex scenes in the book, but they are not particularly explicit.

I liked When We Were Friends, but didn’t love it. I think I would have liked this more had it concentrated on the two women rebuilding their friendship, rather than throwing a couple of other genres into the mix. When We Were Friends is a quick and easy read.

Lovely cover art and pertinent to the plot.

⭐⭐⭐.6

#WhenWeWereFriendsNancyYeager #NetGalley

I: @redadeptpublishing

T: @RAPublishing

#contemporaryfiction #friendship #romance #smalltownfiction

THE AUTHOR: I spent my early years longing to be an English countryside vet thanks to James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small series, and an adventurist archaeologist like George Lucas’s Indiana Jones character. After studying veterinary pre-med and earning an anthropology degree, I realized my true passion is story in all its forms.

When I’m not writing, reading, or binge-watching stories, I’m often pursuing a physical challenge like studying Krav Maga or aspiring to achieve the perfect crow pose. I also spends her time drinking too much coffee, not enough red wine, and just the right amount of bourbon.

I live in Maryland with my fabulous family, which includes some very spoiled rescue cats.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Red Adept Publishing via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of When We Were Friends by Nancy Yeager for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

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