[yasr_overall_rating]
Childhood best friends Rachel Campbell and Claire West have not only grown up, but after fifteen years, they’ve also grown apart. After years of separation, both Claire and Rachel begin to realize what they need most is a friend. The kind of friend they once were to each other, and perhaps can be again.
The two main characters in this novel are Rachel and Claire who at one time, had been very close friends. Rachel is the strong and intelligent one from a poor but respectable background, while Claire is a very fragile girl, both in her mental and physical abilities. They fit into each other’s lives even though Claire comes from a wealthy family. But things change when Rachel’s mother falls and breaks her back and after a while, her father leaves and never comes back. Rachel is shattered and needs to confide in Claire, desperately needing comfort. When she arrives at Claire’s home, she is informed that Claire is busy having a Birthday party with her friends, and that she was not invited, ending up with the front door shut in her face.
Over time, the girls’ lives takes vastly different directions. Claire returns to the seaside home of her childhood, refusing to go to London, where her parents are waiting to micro-manage her life as they have done since she was a child. Her engagement to Hugh (organized by her folks) is over and done with and they are not pleased at all and then her brother, an engineer, working out of Manchester for a few weeks, touches base with her. Rachel has a small house-cleaning business that keeps the bills paid but her future with her broken mother and two sisters, is bleak.
Gradually, the fabric of their lives begins to knit back together, with many ups and downs along the way, and there were times I felt crestfallen and heartbroken as this story is, at times, hard to read. The fairy tale ending did not materialize and it was difficult to imagine the ending of the story as Hewitt wrote it. Life can be very hard, and sometimes, the story becomes almost too real, and you realize, you need a ray of sunshine. When the softer elements of the story are revealed, I just didn’t get the uplift I felt I needed, at times, it was pretty dismal and the sun just did not warm the story.
Overall, ‘Now and Then Friends’ is well-written, a lot of thought went into the characters and author Kate Hewitt did a good job with with the story’s ending. I was just glad when it was over.
Available in bookstores now
