Audiobook Review: My Friends by Fredrik Backman

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: My Friends
Author: Fredrik Backman
Narrator: Marin Ireland
Publisher: Atria Books
Publication date: May 6, 2025
Print length: 436 pages
Audio length: 13 hours, 22 minutes
Genre: Contemporary fiction
Source: Purchased
Rating:

#1 New York Times bestselling author Fredrik Backman returns with an unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a complete stranger’s life twenty-five years later.

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise, and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier, telling silly jokes, sharing secrets, and committing small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. She embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more nervous she becomes about what she’ll find. Louisa is proof that happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art.

This will be a hard review to write… because My Friends is a beautiful, powerful book, and other than saying that I loved it, what else can I say?

This story about the transformative power of friendship and art is startling, funny, and emotional, filled with Fredrik Backman’s unique sense of connection and facility with words. The novel has a voice of its own that immerses the reader right from the start — and while it’s not always clear where the story is going, there’s immense pleasure in the journey.

My Friends has a contemporary setting as a frame, in which 17-year-old Louisa, one day away from the 18th birthday that will set her free from the foster system and also turn her out into the world with no resources or support, breaks into an art gallery to view a painting. It’s not just any painting: The One of the Sea by artist C. Jat is a glorious work depicting (you guessed it) the sea. It’s a hot commodity — the first painting by an artist whose works sell for millions, highly coveted by the rich auction crowd who think it’ll look just fabulous in their summer homes (maybe with a different color frame to go with their decor). But when Louisa sees the painting, she knows it’s really a painting about people — the three small figures, practically hidden, sitting together mid-laugh on a pier.

Through a series of action-filled scenes, Louisa ends up with Ted as a companion and quasi-guardian. Ted, it turns out, is a childhood friend of the artist and also one of the children on the pier in the painting. For reasons I won’t get into, Ted and Louisa end up embarking on a lengthy train journey together, during which their initial distrust and animosity toward one another turns into a nuanced, caring dynamic, as Ted reveals to Louisa what happened during the summer of the painting.

The heart of My Friends is the story from 25 years earlier that Ted tells to Louisa, about growing up in a hard, impoverished harbor town, where friendship is the key to surviving terrible home lives. Ted and his friends are poor, neglected, and bullied… but when they’re together, life could not be better. The fateful summer of the painting, as young teens, they find joy every day they’re together, despite the tragedies unfolding elsewhere in their lives.

As Ted and Louisa travel further together, he reveals the story bit by bit, in a storytelling approach that circles around certain events, hints at others, and then loops back for more. The more Ted shares, the more invested Louisa becomes, until her own emotions become inextricably tied to the events of Ted and his friends’ past.

Fredrik Backman’s writing here is superb. The way the two timelines weave together is magical. Time loops around the two narrative threads, bringing us back to summer days of pranks and swimming and freedom, while never letting us forget that those idyllic days had dark sides and life-long consequences. Backman is also a master at showing the impact of chance encounters — the people who happen to cross paths with someone at a critical moment, and end up having the power to change lives.

There’s such a brilliant mix of light and dark in this book. The writing is funny, and the author’s wordplay always delights.

“WAIT!” Ted bellows desperately at the lights, but that’s about as effective as throwing marshmallows at a whale and thinking it will change direction.

Certain comparisons and phrasing may seem absurd, but through repetition and a deep sense of fun, the writing makes this book sing in even small moments.

Joar couldn’t have looked more disappointed if Santa Claus had turned out to be a dentist.

I don’t want to say much about where the story goes, the events that are revealed, or how the various characters and situations connect to one another. This is a story best appreciated by letting it unfold around you. I will say that I felt completely drawn in by the storytelling, on edge awaiting an anticipated tragedy at one moment, and laughing out loud at outrageous antics another.

Audiobook narrator Marin Ireland, who has narrated several of the author’s books, once again is a marvel. She excels at providing distinct voices for the various characters, and does a terrific job with the dialogue, conveying everything from teen-age bluster to adult weariness and everything in between with utter conviction.

I’ll be thinking about My Friends for a long time to come, and can’t recommend it highly enough. This book should not be missed!

I’ve read several of the author’s books, but have a few earlier ones still to catch up on. After my positive experience with My Friends, I’m eager to dig in and catch up on what I’ve missed. Books I’ve read:

On my to-read list:

The Winners
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry
Britt-Marie Was Here

Have you read any of these three? Is there one you’d particularly recommend?

Purchase links: Amaz o n – Audible audiobook – Bookshop.org – Libro.fm
Disclaimer: When you make a purchase through one of these affiliate links, I may earn a small commission, at no additional cost to you.

27Apr2013

A Monster Calls: Review and reflection

Posted in Book Reviews, Bookish Thoughts by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Book Review: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

What can I say about a book like this? Beautiful and awful are two words that come to mind, but neither do justice to the power of A Monster Calls.

A Monster Calls is the story of Conor O’Malley, a 13-year-old so isolated by suffering that he’s become practically invisible to the world around him. Conor’s mother has cancer, and despite her cheery reassurances, the latest round of chemo does not seem to be going well. Conor’s father departed years ago for a new life with a new wife and baby in America, and Conor lives alone with his mother in a small English town, where he attends school in a fog of despair and loneliness.

At night, though, the nightmares start. Until one night, Conor is visited by a monster — a giant creature formed from the yew tree that Conor can see from his bedroom window. The monster seems like a creature from hell, bent on destruction and threatening to eat Conor — but what it wants is a story. The monster tells Conor its conditions: The monster will tell Conor three different stories, and then it will be Conor’s turn to tell the monster a story, but it must be the truth. Conor knows which story the monster wants from him, and it’s the one thing he absolutely does not want to give voice to.

The monster isn’t all that it seems, and as the story-telling proceeds, the monster becomes the voice of reason and honesty for Conor. Through the monster, Conor is forced to confront his own rage and sorrow, the fact that belief in something — anything — matters, and the subjective nature of terms like “good” and “evil”.

The illustrations in A Monster Calls are stark and glorious. Jim Kay’s black and white inks are stunning — scary and bleak, portraying the monster as otherworldly and frightening, yet also as something natural that seems to belong in the mundane world of garden sheds, grandfather clocks, and schoolyards.

I don’t know that I can really articulate my feelings about this book without going off on a personal tangent. I know that I have certain emotional triggers in books, and A Monster Calls hits all of the most powerful ones for me.

When I was eleven, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. After four years of struggle, illness, and suffering, she died at the young age of forty-four. I was fifteen at the time, and although many years have passed and for the most part I don’t actively think about those years any longer, the emotions still lurk below the surface, never far away. Reading A Monster Calls brought my experiences from those years right back to me.

Conor is overwhelmed by rage — a rage that literally destroys whatever is in its path. All-consuming too is his guilt, a guilt that fuels his nightmares and drives him further and further from the people around him. He goes through the motions of a normal kid’s life, but it’s as if he’s an alien in the midst of humans. His experiences and inner life are so separate, so “other”, that it’s no wonder the kids at his school seem to see right through him. He’s scared for his mother, but he’s also scared for himself. He wants to keep her with him, but he wants her to stop suffering. He’s angry, he’s sad, and he just has no idea what to do with all of the emotions that threaten to engulf him at any second.

I get it. The scariness of watching the parent you count on turn into someone who needs protection. The helplessness of seeing a good and kind person suffer — and seeing that person worry more about her child’s well-being than her own. Being on the receiving end of well-intentioned reassurances that cannot possibly come true. It’s awful and it’s painful and it’s a reminder, especially to a child, of just how little in life can be controlled.

So yes, I read A Monster Calls and could barely breathe by the end. Reading Conor’s story was an instant and visceral reminder of my own experiences during the terrible years of my mother’s illness. The book feels real and true. It’s not a soapy melodrama, but an honest look at the messy emotions that are bundled up in loss and grief.

In spare but lovely prose, Patrick Ness captures all of this and more, and the illustrations are stunningly perfect. A Monster Calls is an award winning children’s book, geared for ages 12 and up, but it’s certainly something that adults should seek out as well.

My 10-year-old, having seen me absorbed by this book all week, has asked if I’d read it to him when I finished. I think he’s mostly fascinated by the artwork — understandably so. I hate to turn down a request for a book. As someone who always read “up” (grabbing whatever books my older sister was reading whenever she wasn’t looking), I don’t usually pay too much attention to recommended age ranges for reading materials. And yet, I don’t think my kiddo is really ready for something like this yet. It’s one thing to read about loss and grief in a fantasy setting such as Harry Potter — quite another to read about a boy going through a horrible loss in a real, recognizable world. I do think I’d like him to read A Monster Calls eventually — but perhaps in a few years, when he’s ready to read it on his own and really be prepared to think and reflect about Conor’s experiences.

According to the Author’s Note, the characters and premise of this story were created by the author Siobhan Dowd, who herself died from cancer before she was able to bring the concept to fruition. Patrick Ness was asked to take her initial concepts and turn them into a book, and he has done so in way that feels like both a beautiful achievement on its own and a lovely tribute to Siobhan Dowd. A Monster Calls is quite an accomplishment on so many levels, and all I can say is that it shouldn’t be missed.