Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Oct 2010
272 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
From the bestselling author of Bee Season comes an astonishingly complex psychological drama with a simple setup: two eleven-year-old girls, best friends and fierce rivals, go into the woods. Only one comes out ....
Leaders of a mercurial clique of girls, Celia and Djuna reigned mercilessly over their three followers. One afternoon, they decided to walk home along a forbidden road. Djuna disappeared, and for twenty years Celia blocked out how it happened.
The lie Celia told to conceal her misdeed became the accepted truth: everyone assumed Djuna had been abducted, though neither she nor her abductor was ever found. Celia’s unconscious avoidance of this has meant that while she and her longtime boyfriend, Huck, are professionally successful, they’ve been unable to move forward, their relationship falling into a rut that threatens to bury them both.
Celia returns to her hometown to confess the truth, but her family and childhood friends don’t believe her. Huck wants to be supportive, but his love can’t blind him to all that contradicts Celia’s version of the past.
Celia’s desperate search to understand what happened to Djuna has powerful consequences. A deeply resonant and emotionally charged story, The False Friend explores the adults that children become—leading us to question the truths that we accept or reject, as well as the lies to which we succumb.
"Goldberg uses beautiful, emotionally descriptive language to keep us with one ear to the ground, listening for the slow, quiet footsteps of creeping tragedy." - Booklist
"Goldberg misplays the setup, trading psychological suspense for a routine story of self-discovery." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. [A] layered, understated novel about the complex, ambiguous nature of memory and its effect on the dynamics of relationships. Great fodder for reading groups." - Library Journal
"Complex, compelling characters who defy pigeonholing override Goldberg's tendency to map out the plot too neatly." - Kirkus
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Myla Goldberg is a bestselling novelist, winner of the Borders New Voices Prize, a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award, the NYPL Young Lions award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover award, and recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant. She writes and teaches in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband Jason Little and their two daughters.
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