Book Review: The Friendship Breakup

The Friendship Breakup. Annie Cathryn, Alcove Press, 7 February 2023, Paperback, Audiobook, and eBook, 301 pages.

Reviewed by Paula Mikrut.

If there’s an upside to being an adult, it’s leaving high school nonsense behind—the competition for status, with rules no one told you about until you broke them, the kids who got to dictate who was part of the “in” crowd. The problem is, the mean kids are still out there, and sometimes they show up just as you’ve let your guard down.

Fallon is three months shy of forty and in the process of starting a chocolate business, which is her way of bringing joy into the world. She has always felt like an outsider, but she is lucky at this point in her life to have a solid set of friendships she can count on. Or so she thinks. But for the past few weeks, Beatrice hasn’t returned her texts or calls. And the rest of their circle of friends follow Beatrice’s lead, leaving Fallon alone and wondering what she did wrong.

At first, she tries to convince herself that this is a misunderstanding—maybe her phone is silent because her daughter, Maya, accidentally changed her settings. But when all her efforts to communicate fail, she acknowledges the truth. She’s been ghosted by her best friend and shunned by the rest of her crowd. The situation gets even worse when Beatrice’s daughter has a sleepover and doesn’t invite Maya.

Now Fallon must decide how much she is willing to do to mend her relationships and whether true friendships can really be so brittle. In the process, she decides to finally research her adoption, which she found out about accidentally when she was eighteen and which left her with feelings of abandonment that make it hard for her to form healthy relationships.

The Friendship Breakup is an enjoyable read. I suspect that Fallon will remind many of us of ourselves—outwardly happy and successful, inwardly feeling out of step with everyone else. She is talented and caring, messy and insecure. I found myself wanting to do battle on her behalf, to shake some of the characters and tell them to grow up already. But mostly, I wanted to turn the pages and find out whether things turned out well for her.

Read this book if you’ve ever found yourself wondering, as one character does, “Do you ever get the feeling that life isn’t turning out quite like you expected it to?”