Book Review The Other’s Gold by Elizabeth Ames

Make new friends, but keep the old

One is silver and the other’s gold

*****

From the book synopsis:

An insightful and sparkling novel that opens on a college campus and follows the friendship of four women across life-defining turning points

Assigned to the same suite during their freshman year at Quincy-Hawthorne College, Lainey, Ji Sun, Alice, and Margaret quickly become inseparable. The leafy green campus they move through together, the idyllic window seat they share in their suite, and the passion and ferocity that school and independence awakens in them ignites an all-encompassing love with one another. But they soon find their bonds–forged in joy, and fused by fear–must weather threats that originate from beyond the dark forests of their childhoods, and come at them from institutions, from one another, and ultimately, from within themselves.

The Other’s Gold follows the four friends as each makes a terrible mistake, moving from their wild college days to their more feral days as new parents. With one part devoted to each mistake–the Accident, the Accusation, the Kiss, and the Bite–this complex yet compulsively readable debut interrogates the way that growing up forces our friendships to evolve as the women discover what they and their loved ones are capable of, and capable of forgiving. A joyful, big-hearted book that perfectly evokes the bittersweet experience of falling in love with friendship, the experiences of Lainey, Ji Sun, Alice, and Margaret are at once achingly familiar and yet shine with a brilliance and depth all their own.

My thoughts:

You’re either going to love this book or hate it. If you fall in love with its compelling, engaging writing style and care for Alice, Margaret, Ji Sun and Lainey as they move from adolescence of their freshman year in college to adulthood, you will not want the book to end, or at very least hope for regular updates in future to know how they are doing. If you don’t connect with the book, the story is going to seem long and unnecessarily detailed. Life on paper…

The four girls were assigned the same suite with a window seat on their first day of college. They thought that they were placed together based on the fact that all of them were second daughters and only later noticed that their last names started with an R, an S and two Ts. As Elizabeth Ames spells her story you see the magic of becoming friends as powerful (if not more) as falling in love. There are people around them: boyfriends, acquaintances, professors, parents, siblings, some of them more important than others, some failing to make anything but a very fleeting impression. It is clear, though, that for Alice, Margaret ,Ji Sun and Lainey, their friendship is in part something that defines them. Perhaps, even more than their families, because it might have begun as a random decision of a housing officer, but it continued by choice, which is evident in how they continued to love and care for each other despite their worst deeds, their shameful mistakes.

We are told at the very beginning when the mistakes were made: Alice’s before the college, when she was twelve, Ji Sun’s in the sophomore year, Margaret’s after the graduation and Lainey’s already as a mother to her own child. Four mistakes, four parts of the book, one life that led to that moment and one life in which to make sense of what happened and live it down however much it changes you and people around you.

Don’t think you are not going to judge them- you will. Because, to be honest, they are really inexcusable, those deeds. But you will judge them not as a stranger, but as an invisible friend, trying to see all the reasons and circumstances that led to their lapse of judgement. Reasons they might not be aware of themselves.

No one knows everything about anyone. Not even themselves. Maybe least of all themselves.

Are the characters relatable? yes, they are. I could see bits of myself and my own friends in the girls. The characters are unique and wonderfully complex, and go through intense changes moving from one part of the book to another. You know, you feel it in your bones, they will continue evolving long after the book because this is life, and what we’ve just read is just a glimpse.

The issues the book discusses are not the easiest. Don’t go into the book thinking it will be a light summer read: infertility, sexual harrassment and abuse, miscarriage, depression, adoption are all here, among the other curveballs life throws the four friends to deal with. But the way the author talks about them is both painfully honest and sensitive.

A wonderful debut novel, lyrical, beautifully-written and emotional.

Thank you to Edelweiss and Viking (Penguin Publishing Group) for the ARC provided in exchange for an honest opinion. 

• Have you read TheOther’s Gold or is it on your tbr?
• What’s the best book about a lifelong friendship you have read recently?