Friends and Strangers is a powerful look at privilege, friendships and just what can happen in a single year. It's a book that is relevant and will resonate with many readers.

I had no preconceptions about this book, I didbt read the synopsis I just started. I was somewhat confused, and needed to plough on to get a feel of what was happening.

This book is written really well, the chapters are bursting with information, no skim reading in this book. I had to really concentrate to absorb the story of Elisabeth and Sam.

Because I didn't read the blurp about the book l had no idea what the story would be about (a new advantage and one I will try again). It made the story more engaging wondering where the story was going, what was the premise of these two.

As previously said, alot of information facts and background story. I enjoy when an author talks about a previous situation in a character life then the next chapter takes you back to explain the situation or event fully. This is a brilliant example of mastery in the skill of this, without it being preachy its naturally part of the story.

The story is beautiful of 2 very different generations of women who battle issues and problems together but leads to them falling apart. It's an eye opening read, the inner dialogue builds the story and I often found myself trying to get ahead to find out what would happen.

The book is not filled with filler passages and gaps of time pass between chapters which I love to see in a book, the author can jump ahead to the next stage without needing a long drawn out review of that time in between meaning that all writing is relevant to the story.

Highly recommended this book, it's a beautiful story which has enough factual information to trigger thoughts about your own life.


#NetGalley #FriendsAndStrangers #bookreview #2020books

Friends and Strangers charts the complicated relationship between a journalist, Elisabeth, and her babysitter, Sam. While that is, ostensibly, the plot of this book, the real story cannot be neatly packaged on one sentence. Because more than friendship, motherhood, or family, what this novel really deals with is money. And the privilege that comes with it. And I loved that it spoke so frankly and honestly about money through the lens of women.

“Being a person was expensive.”

We meet Elisabeth early one morning, as she wakes up to breastfeed her four-month-old son Gil, conceived through IVF. She and her husband Andrew have recently moved to a small town after decades in Brooklyn, and she feels adrift. In just a few pages, what comes across is the sense of distance: The physical distance from her life in the city; the distance from her own body, after the birth of her child; the distance from her parents, who have not yet met her infant son. The feeling of being an outsider becomes apparent when she still routinely checks her BK Mamas Facebook group. Elisabeth also struggles with being a good wife, a good mother—two identities for which she never had a role model.

Sam, a college student, is trying to make ends meet, surrounded as she is by friends who don’t need to think about money. She lives in their world, but doesn’t “belong” there.

The narrative shifts from both their perspectives—from their first meeting, as they slowly build a friendship. Class is front and centre in their interactions. But what their stories show is the gap in how we perceive our privilege.

“I hate thinking about money, don’t you? I prefer to pretend that it doesn’t exist,” Elisabeth tells Sam, one day.

Sam works in the cafeteria, where she feels more comfortable, able to somehow relate to other workers. Because she, too, has two jobs and is “one of them”. What she doesn’t realise is that her education and family support afford her a degree of privilege she takes for granted. Elisabeth comes from money, but hasn’t taken a cent from her father since she was 23—does that mean the safety net doesn’t exist? No. Being able to refuse financial support is a privilege as well.

I liked the novel and the way it explored interpersonal dynamics—even minor characters had a point of view, or spoke to the “big picture”. I do think, though, that there was too much the book tried to cover, which made me lose focus of the essential story. There was the Man, the immigrant experience, race and class, minimum wage, brief segues into opioid crises and school shootings. Overall I would recommend it… this would make a good “buddy read” or book club choice because there is so much to unpack. And it creates space for difficult conversations.

Thank you Netgalley and John Murray Press for the ARC.

There was nothing really wrong with this novel, the story of two women, one a mother and journalist, the other the young student she hires to babysit, but it just felt so predictable and unoriginal. There was nothing new, no new insights, just the same old reiteration of the problems of contemporary women, the issues they face of motherhood versus career, IVF, social media, employing “help”, marital misunderstandings and so on and so on. I felt I’d read it all before and the book failed to engage me. I gave up after a while and just skimmed to the end, where no startling revelation convinced me my initial assessment was flawed. Just not for me this one.

J. Courtney Sullivan writes a slow paced human drama, an emotional, insightful and compassionate look at a new mother and her babysitter's relationship as she peels back the layers beyond the initial idolisation and friendship between employer and employee. Elizabeth, a recent transplant to a small town in upstate New York, a new mother with a much wanted IVF baby, is a writer leaving NYC with her husband, Andrew, for a more rural idyll with family close by in the form of Andrew's family. However, it turns out to be far from a dream location, Elizabeth is finding motherhood a fraught experience, there is the tedium, the constant getting up at night, and she is feeling a strong sense of disconnection, a deep loneliness she cannot assuage with the local women she is surrounded by as she mentally distances herself from them.

Instead, Elizabeth is missing the life and people she has left behind in New York City, she spends her time on social media, including following her sister, and unable to tune into her normal ambition and struggling to get any writing done, her head a mess of confusion, she is laden with an inability to ground herself in her current realities. She hires Sam as a babysitter, who provides her with 'friendship', and is grateful for her connection with the baby. Sam is a student at the local college, trying to make ends meet, from a loving family with financial difficulties, working in the college cafeteria, where she feels more at home than with her fellow more privileged students, and has a London boyfriend. Sam wants to emulate Elizabeth, seeing her as the perfect role model, but it does not take long before the rose tinted glasses fall off and their relationship hits trouble as the issues that have been simmering below the surface break out in the open.

Courtney Sullivan storytelling is sensitive and resonates, touching on issues like class divisions, perfectly capturing Elizabeth's blindness to her own privilege and the impact it made on her life despite being estranged from her family. What happens to her father-in-law, the career he has built up through the years going down the drain, illustrating the turbulent economic realities in the US, how much harder it is to survive where big companies treat their workers so poorly, with the constant chipping away of the middle class. This is a well written and engaging read, on family, motherhood, inequality, power, privilege, money and politics, social media, deception and secrets. Many thanks to John Murray Press for an ARC.

I absolutely loved this book. It reminded me a lot of Modern Lovers by Emma Straub - no bad thing as I absolutely loved that book too! - and a bit of Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, except instead of racially charged satire there are low-stakes debates about motherhood, friendship, privilege and identity which are nonetheless well executed enough to keep the reader hungrily turning the pages. The novel explores the relationship between Elisabeth, a writer who comes from money and has just had her first child, and her babysitter Sam, who comes from a working-class background and works in the kitchens at her college (a fictionalised version of Smith). Sam, a little naive, sees no difference between her own situation and that of the Latin American women who work in the kitchen, getting them into trouble in her well-meaning but misguided attempt to change things. The Brooklyn (BK) Mamas Facebook page was a hilarious highlight and I loved the heroine's sister Charlotte, an appalling influencer who commits every social media sin under the sun, as well as the book's larger debates about what's happening to American society - subtly explored but still powerful - however, its real strength is in its attention to detail. Mary McCarthy's The Group gets namechecked (again) at a local book group and most of the social events the characters host are doomed, putting one in mind of Working Moms or Friends from College - this would also be a lovely Netflix series. The final confrontation between the women seemed a little manufactured and out of character, but has to happen in order for Sam to move ahead and self-actualise, while Elisabeth starts to realise her part in America's deep-rooted inequality and explores it in her next book. Lovely writing, I will be looking for more from this author.

I liked the writing of this Novel. It’s a very slow character based story. Elisabeth has just moved away from a city and hires a college student to look after the baby.