“Twenty-five years later he still wishes for the same thing, that he was fourteen years old and that the world was full of broken clocks.
“As seventeen-year-olds they would sleep next to each other almost every night in the foster home, with ice cream stains on their clothes and each other’s laughter in their lungs, a chest of drawers against the door, each clutching a screwdriver in case anyone tried to get in.”
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Fredrik Backman is my favorite hearthug & heartbreak author – no one else can shred my heart into a million pieces in the span of five words before following it up with a fart joke that has me chuckling through burning eyes, lump still in throat. He writes humans and life better than anyone. Life is gritty and bloody, and trust is to be guarded. But we laugh. We laugh through bruises and broken bones, through dark days and stolen innocence. And there is nothing more beautiful than when you find one of yours and there’s more laughter than before, and My Friends (Atria 2025), a novel about four fourteen-year-olds and the events that unfolded that last summer before they turned fifteen, is beautiful. You’ll cry. But you’ll laugh. Hard.
I don’t want to spoil this novel, so I’m not going to talk about the actual plot. I will say that even with the Donna Tartt reference, My Friends is likely going to be in my top five at the end of year. (I don’t like the literary brat pack. We’ve discussed this before.) This novel was reminiscent of Beartown and My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell you She’s Sorry – pulling at some of the very things that made me fall in love with Backman’s writing to begin with. Unsurprisingly, it gave me echoes of Stephen King and, surprisingly, Fried Green Tomatoes.
If you haven’t read Backman, I’d recommend starting with My Friends or Beartown or My Grandmother Asked me to Tell You she’s Sorry – or, what remains likely my favorite, A Man Called Ove.
Read this book. And remember, life will break your heart, but if it didn’t, you wouldn’t be living.
“I love you and I believe in you.”
A Girl Named Tommi 