Review: Girls' Night Out

Girls' Night Out by Liz Fenton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thank You to Netgalley, Lake Union Publishing and the authors Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke for an ARC in exchange for an hones review. All opinions are my own and independent of receiving and advanced copy.

Three girls, who were at one time best friends, had a falling out and decide to go to Mexico to see if they can mend their relationships. Ashley, Natalie and Lauren soon discover that friendships are not so easily put back together, even if they miss each other and want to try to mend fences. What was supposed to be a week of reconnecting and reaffirming their love for each other, ended up being filled with harsh words and hurt feelings. Then, tragedy strikes when Ashley goes missing and Natalie wakes up disoriented, on the beach, with no memory of what happened. The story is told in alternating chapters, through all three of the girls’ perspectives and jumps back and forth in time from the days leading up to Ashley’s disappearance to the days after.

Ashley and Natalie are co-owners of a very successful business with a product called “Blo-Me”, a hair brush that blow dries your hair. I know right! The authors do have fun with it and those tongue in cheek moments are only part of the charm of this book. The novel could have an identity crisis - am I a thriller?, am I chick lit?, am I about friendship?, but it does such a great job of combining all these different aspects into one really enjoyable read. I was reading something else and someone’s review of this book caught my eye. I didn’t read the review because I didn’t want it to influence (or ruin) the book for me, but I thought I would just see what the first few pages were like. I was hooked. It was such easy reading that I flew through the book in about a day. It did a great balancing act between these different genres that it’s parts ended up becoming greater than the whole.

So Ashley and Natalie are at odds because a huge offer from Revlon has come in to buy their company. Natalie wants to, well needs to sell and Ashley refuses. They each have their reasons but has caused a rift in their very strong bond. This tension between them has also caused them to stop confiding in each other, which further creates distance. Then there is Lauren, who lost her husband a year ago. Ashley and Lauren had a huge fight at the funeral and both said horrible things that has led them to not speaking for the past year. Ashley’s marriage is falling apart and she needs her best friends. She invites them both to go on this trip to Mexico and hopes that by extending the olive branch they can all make their way back to each other.

Fenton and Steinke get so many things right about friendships, which I found to be the most enjoyable part of this book. Ashley is a force of nature. Beautiful and outgoing, she is someone who is used to getting her way. Confident and sexy, she can manipulate anyone to give her anything and is used to flying by the seat of her pants leaving someone else to clean up her mess. But everyone is drawn to her, including both her best friends. As can happen in threesomes, both Natalie and Lauren are jealous of the other person’s relationship with Ashley and they each want Ashley to choose them first. They fight for her attention. The dynamics of their relationship along with their personalities impacts on whether or not they will be able to reconcile on this trip. As the book develops and more facts become clear, you really understand how this plays out in their friendship. Who hasn’t had these relationships in their life? You can relate to each of these women because we have all been them at one point or another in our lives.

The thriller part of the novel was enough to keep me intrigued. There is a mysterious man, Marcos, who enchants Ashley. The girls know that he has lied about who he is. Natalie wakes up all wet after having slept on the beach with no memory of the night before. Was she drugged or is her mind protecting her from something worse. Lauren had a terrible fight with Ashley and left them to return to the hotel. Her words were so awful, if only she could have forgiven Ashley. Everything gets answered, if in an ambiguous sort of way. The only weak part of the book for me was the role of mother. Both Ashley and Natalie are mothers and neither of the depictions rang true. It could be that it would have been too much to add something else in the mix but I didn’t buy it. There was a lot of time and effort put into each of the ladies’ husbands but the kids part seemed off. I didn’t need them to be mother of the year, but I didn’t buy these women who were so invested in their relationships with each other, their husbands and their business to then be so flat with their kids.

You should also check out the story behind the authors. I read the afterwords and was so intrigued I went to their website. Their story was so cute and exciting that I am interested in reading (and have purchased) their other novels. I can see why they write about friendship so clearly!

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