Starred Review ALA Booklist (Sat Jul 01 00:00:00 CDT 2017)

Starred Review After the fierce complexity of The Woman Upstairs (2013), Messud presents a more concentrated, no less emotionally intense novel about an adhesively close friendship between two Massachusetts girls and its tragic unraveling. Fatherless Cassie, whose mother is a hospice nurse, is tiny, radiantly pale, and audacious. Julia, Messud's wise-beyond-her-years narrator, is sturdy, voraciously observant, and quick-witted, the doted-on daughter of a dentist and a writer. During the summer before seventh grade, the girls' volunteer efforts at an animal shelter end in a bloody mess. They then instigate even riskier adventures trekking out to and exploring a long-abandoned women's mental asylum. Over the next two years, Julia thrives in school; Cassie does not. The boy Julia likes likes Cassie. Cassie's mother finds a nightmare of a boyfriend, and Cassie disappears behind a carapace of secrecy and stoicism that conceals deepening despair. Julia's concern over Cassie intertwines with her musings on the suffering of the asylum patients as she discerns that growing up female "was about learning to be afraid." Messud's entrancing, gorgeously incisive coming-of-age drama astutely tracks the sharpening perceptions of an exceptionally eloquent young woman navigating heartbreak and regret and realizing that one can never fathom "the wild, unknowable interior lives" of others, not even someone you love.

Starred Review for Kirkus Reviews (Sun Oct 01 00:00:00 CDT 2017)

Messud (The Woman Upstairs, 2013, etc.) investigates the fraught intricacies of friendship and adolescence as two girls grow up and grow apart in a small Massachusetts town.About to start her senior year of high school, narrator Julia painfully traces the loss of her childhood friend Cassie, a bold rule-breaker who goaded and thrilled cautious Julia even as she relied on her friend's good sense to keep them safe. During the charmed intimacy of childhood, Julia wistfully recalls, "we had one mind and could roam its limits together, inventing stories and making ourselves as we wanted them to be." But in seventh grade Cassie drifts away to a more popular crowd, adding insult to injury by dating and then dropping Peter, an older boy she knows Julia likes. With characteristically lucid prose, Messud perfectly captures the agonizing social insecurities of middle school in Julia's seething assessment that Cassie "thought she could laugh at me to my face…she was Regina George from Mean Girls and I was Janis." Payback comes when Cassie's widowed mother, Bev, falls in love with Dr. Anders Shute, who may have an unhealthy interest in Cassie and certainly encourages Bev to confine and control her in ways that lead to a crisis. By this time, Julia has new friends of her own and a more secure social niche in ninth grade; she knows Cassie is in trouble but is too hurt and too invested in her new role—this is very much a book about masks and performances—to respond when Cassie tentatively reaches out. Although their shared past gives Julia the knowledge to forestall disaster when Cassie vanishes, Messud also suggests that we never truly know another, not even those we love best. That stark worldview only slowly becomes apparent in a narrative that for a long time seems more overwrought than events call for (it is, after all, narrated by a teenager), but by the novel's closing pages it packs an emotional wallop. Emotionally intense and quietly haunting.

Kirkus Reviews (Fri Oct 04 00:00:00 CDT 2024)

Messud (The Woman Upstairs, 2013, etc.) investigates the fraught intricacies of friendship and adolescence as two girls grow up and grow apart in a small Massachusetts town.About to start her senior year of high school, narrator Julia painfully traces the loss of her childhood friend Cassie, a bold rule-breaker who goaded and thrilled cautious Julia even as she relied on her friend's good sense to keep them safe. During the charmed intimacy of childhood, Julia wistfully recalls, "we had one mind and could roam its limits together, inventing stories and making ourselves as we wanted them to be." But in seventh grade Cassie drifts away to a more popular crowd, adding insult to injury by dating and then dropping Peter, an older boy she knows Julia likes. With characteristically lucid prose, Messud perfectly captures the agonizing social insecurities of middle school in Julia's seething assessment that Cassie "thought she could laugh at me to my face…she was Regina George from Mean Girls and I was Janis." Payback comes when Cassie's widowed mother, Bev, falls in love with Dr. Anders Shute, who may have an unhealthy interest in Cassie and certainly encourages Bev to confine and control her in ways that lead to a crisis. By this time, Julia has new friends of her own and a more secure social niche in ninth grade; she knows Cassie is in trouble but is too hurt and too invested in her new role—this is very much a book about masks and performances—to respond when Cassie tentatively reaches out. Although their shared past gives Julia the knowledge to forestall disaster when Cassie vanishes, Messud also suggests that we never truly know another, not even those we love best. That stark worldview only slowly becomes apparent in a narrative that for a long time seems more overwrought than events call for (it is, after all, narrated by a teenager), but by the novel's closing pages it packs an emotional wallop. Emotionally intense and quietly haunting.

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Trying to console her heartbroken daughter, Julia Robinson-s mother muses, -Everyone loses a best friend at some point.- Julia is the narrator of Messud-s beautiful novel about two young girls, inseparable since nursery school in a small Massachusetts town, who feel they-re -joined by an invisible thread,- but who drift apart as they come of age. For years, Julia and Cassie Burnes have shared adventures and dreams, but as they cross the pivotal threshold into seventh grade, Julia feels betrayed when Cassie is drawn to boys, alcohol, and drugs. To the reader, the split seems inevitable. Julia is the product of a stable household, but Cassie-s blowsy, unreliable mother transfers her affection to a brutally controlling lover who destroys Cassie-s sense of security. Desperately unhappy, Cassie sets out to find the father she has never known and begins a spiral of self-destruction that Julia, now no longer Cassie-s intimate friend, must hear about from the boy they both love. Messud shines a tender gaze on her protagonists and sustains an elegiac tone as she conveys the volatile emotions of adolescent behavior and the dawning of female vulnerability (-being a girl is about learning to be afraid-). Julia voices the novel-s leitmotif: that everyone-s life is essentially a mysterious story, distorted by myths. Although it reverberates with astute insights, in some ways this simple tale is less ambitious but more heartfelt than Messud-s previous work. The Emperor-s Children was a many-charactered, satiric study of Ivy League-educated, entitled young people making it in New York. The Woman Upstairs was a clever, audacious portrayal of an untrustworthy protagonist. Informed by the same sophisticated intelligence and elegant prose, but gaining new poignant depths, this novel is haunting and emotionally gripping. (Aug.)

School Library Journal (Sun Oct 01 00:00:00 CDT 2017)

In Julia's first memory of her best friend, Cassie is standing in the middle of their preschool playground, looking like a sprite with her shiny white hair and tiny stature. From that moment on, they belong to each other. Fast-forward through years of imaginative games and adventures to the summer before seventh grade. That summer a pit bull shreds Cassie's arm, necessitating a visit to Dr. Anders Shute, who comes to play a terrible role in the girl's life. That same summer the girls discover Bonnybrook, an abandoned asylum for women. But seventh grade brings change. Cassie finds a new, wilder friend, and the girls grow apart. Julia, whose life is filled with opportunity, attempts to reconstruct the series of events that led to Cassie's ultimate tragedy, relying on hearsay and her presumption that she can still intuit her friend's thoughts and emotions. From Julia's perspective, Cassie is surrounded by danger: men driving cars in the dark, boys piling into bathrooms at parties, and the creepy Anders Shute, who married Cassie's mother. Teens who love novels taut with psychological tension will be intrigued by Cassie's downward spiral and Julia's curious role as storyteller. Much more than a tale of friendship gone awry, this dark work explores the roles we accept, those we reject, and those we thrust upon others. VERDICT A gripping coming-of-age narrative that will appeal to fans of Emma Cline's The Girls or Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You.Diane Colson, formerly at City College, Gainesville, FL