Book Review: "The Best of Friends" by Lucinda Berry

Lucinda Berry's books are quite an exciting discovery for me. I started off with Saving Noah and I can honestly say that it will haunt my soul until I die. Filled with family intrigue and brutally grey moral areas, the book scared the crap out of me without it even being a horror novel. One of the best books I have read all year and so, it would definitely lead me to check out her other books. I didn't actually realise I had this book on my phone. Best of Friends isn't just about three teenage boys who are the best of friends when something horrific happens to them, but it is also about three best friends with a past that led to all these events: their mothers. Now, one of the boys is dead, one is in a coma and the other is traumatised beyond words as he hasn't been speaking lately...

There are three teenagers: Sawyer, Jacob and Caleb. Then there are their respective mothers: Kendra, Lindsey and Dani. This is important seeing as the story starts off with us wondering which child has died and which one has ended up in a coma rather than wondering why that last one isn't saying anything. The book opens with Kendra running around frantically after hearing gunshots from the direction of her son's friend's house. She wants to get in as the police arrive but they don't let her - she's screaming and shouting that her son was staying over at his friends house and is in there - she needs to make sure he is alright. Ultimately though, Sawyer is the boy who died. Lucinda Berry starts off with letting us know, through small hints, that Sawyer is not alright - the next chapter is only a short amount of time after his funeral. He died from a gunshot wound to the stomach, but who shot him and why?

Jacob is lying in a coma in the hospital, barely alive and hooked up to machinery as his mother, Lindsey, obsessively watches over him as much as she physically can. His head is covered in pressure sores and he is in a critical condition in which we don't know whether he is going to be alright. The doctors keep looking towards him but as Lindsey's marriage to Andrew becomes strained through an emotional affair he has been having with a woman he has never seen or met online, she is being spread pretty damn thin. Lucinda Berry writes her as a woman who is simply trying her best - she often can seem a bit cold and logical for a woman who's son is in a coma, but I think presenting her as emotionally exhausted would have been exasperating and cliché. When people get this sad, they don't go sobbing to anyone who will listen, they simply shut down. Jacob is severely injured and the police are telling the parents it was a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. But why would Jacob - a happy and fun child - shoot himself?

Then there's Caleb. Caleb was covered in blood, traumatised by what he had seen and unable to put it into words. He starts going slowly mad and regressing into child-like actions that are well below his years. He has to be taken to a psychiatric facility and watched on and yet, he won't say what he saw. Dani's marriage is strained and horrid as her husband, Bryan, is found to be abusing her. Everything shifts though when Bryan takes out his anger on their daughter, Luna. Dani cannot stay any longer and must leave, but on top of that she needs to get the truth out of the only person who knows what happened: their son. Lucinda Berry writes Caleb's character as a mixture between circumstance and a boy who has inherited his parent's characteristics in some dangerous ways. But there is always something about the story we don't understand until we find out the whole thing and Caleb is that missing puzzle piece. But what does he know?

This book is misdirection and misalignment at its best. We focus so much on who died and why that we kind of miss out on the smaller details, one of which involves the parenting styles of the three mothers and their past friendship in school. We also need to look at the way the fathers influence their sons' behaviours and how. All details may not be learnt until the very end, but the mothers are just as flawed as their children and their children have inherited some of those shifty traits.