Best Friends Forever - Cathryn Grant

Reading Challenge Category: Free ARC from Booksprout

Official Blurb:

Two friends. One road trip. A journey to hell.
Recently divorced, Abbey is hungry for new experiences, determined to live life to the full.
So when her old college friend, Raven, suggests a road trip, she leaps at the chance. But they haven’t gone far when they realize a stranger is following them.
As his behavior becomes more and more threatening, it begins to dawn on Abbey that this is no random psychopath. He is pursuing them because he is connected to a terrible event in her past.
What she doesn’t know is that Raven hasn’t been completely honest about this trip - she too has been keeping a dark secret.
And now they are running for their lives from a man who knows that one of them deserves to die…

My Thoughts:

This was an ok read. It kept me gripped enough, but I found connecting with the story and characters hard.
We are getting the story from three points of view. We have Abbey, Raven and Lily. Lily’s sections were set in the past in the form of diary entries.
Abbey and Raven have reconnected after years of estrangement. They had an incredible bond whilst at college together, and Raven is desperate to rekindle this and get her best friend back. On the other hand, Abbey isn’t so ready to forgive the past. As the trip progresses, her need for answers becomes more imperative.
Raven is not a very likeable character. Her attitude to situations is entirely over the top, and the way she speaks to Abbey is unrealistic. She wants to reconnect, yet she speaks to Abbey like a mother would reprimand her child. It made for very uncomfortable reading. If I were Abbey, I would have left at the side of the road and not returned. This is not to say Abbey was any less annoying; I couldn’t quite get a handle on her behaviour either. She was a little too carefree. I’m not sure if this was entirely to wind Raven up or not. The topic of gaslighting came up a lot as this is what Abbey was trying to do to Raven. I felt it was too obvious; she should have been a little nicer to Raven for the gaslighting to work. It needed to be more subtle. She wouldn’t get the answers she was after with how she played it.
Lily’s diary was probably the best part of the book. She talks about her two roommates, ‘The Roaches’, and you don’t at first know which is which. I really felt for her but again found the roaches’ behaviour over the top and unrealistic. In addition, if Lily had a twin brother at the university, why didn’t she turn to him for more support if she felt that ostracised?
The ending was ok. I’m not sure all of the tracks were covered to hide who was responsible for what happened, but it was a shocking enough ending for me to feel like I hadn’t wasted my time reading this.
Overall, a very unrealistic novel but enjoyable enough for what it was. A solid average three stars from me.