My Friends

Author: Fredrik Backman

Who Picked the Book: Christina

One-sentence summary: A group of teenage friends grow up facing loss and heartache, simultaneously enduring and learning how to live and love.

B.A.D. Girls Book Rating: 8

Our favorite thing about it: We were all engaged by the story of the friends.

Our least favorite thing about it: The writing style was hard to adjust to for many of us.

Main Topics of Discussion: Friendship, Loss, Suspense, Storytelling, Art, Connection, Characters

Our favorite quote: "The world is full of miracles, but none greater than how far a young person can be carried by someone else’s belief in them."

Notes: We all agreed that we enjoyed this book for the most part. A couple of us really loved it. We liked reading about the characters and really wanted to know how their story ended. There were some really lovely parts about love, art, and connection that resonated with us. Some lines were really beautiful. 

But the writing style was hard for some of us as well. The translation into English made it a little hard to adjust to. And the writing seemed overwrought. Every sentence had to have a deep meaning and it was a little bit of a turn off for some of us. We shared the angst that Louisa had over how long Ted was taking to tell the story. It seemed to take forever. And then, some parts seemed deliberately misleading to some of us. Others of us were not bothered by that. And finally, although we wanted to know the ending to the story, we didn't really connect with any of the characters that much. 

So we enjoyed the book and acknowledge that there are profound and touching parts to is, but for some of us it had equally annoying aspects!

Memorable Meeting Moments: It was just the DFW crew for this meeting. We met at a new place for all of us, Escape 360 Cafe in McKinney. We also went to Christina's temporary home for the first time as a group! And Christina gave us beautiful flowers!

What We Ate: We all had shrimp and chicken dishes with varying degrees of spice! We shared two kinds of souffles (which were more like Japanese pancakes) - Biscoff and Nutella with Banana. We also shared a Biscoff cheesecake and got Pumpkin Hot Chocolate and coffee.