Book Review: Friend of the Family by Tasmina Perry

Title: Friend of the Family

Author: Tasmina Perry

Publisher: Headline Review

Date: September 20th, 2018

Pages: 384

Format: Physical ARC

Source: from Publisher for a review

 

Synopsis (from Goodreads): 

You trust your friend, so you’d trust her daughter. Wouldn’t you…?

When an old university friend gets in touch with a request for work experience for her daughter, magazine editor Amy agrees. Twenty-year-old Josie walks into Amy’s office, moves into the basement of her Notting Hill house and is soon helping out with her children after Amy’s nanny is hit by a car. It seems the natural thing therefore for Amy to invite Josie on the family’s annual to Provence. When a series of things start to go wrong in their luxurious villa, Amy begins to suspect that Josie isn’t quite the friendly presence she appears. But when no one, not even her husband believes her, she realises she will have to play Josie at her own game in order to expose her true intentions…

Review:

This year has been great when it comes to discovering to me new authors. Tasmina Perry is one of them.

I appreciate so much the chance I got to read and review Friend of the Family, because I really enjoyed this story, and I loved the writing style, and now I want to read more work by Tasmina Perry.

The story follows Amy who works in journalism, in a magazine called Verve.
One day she is contacted by her high school best friend, who asks her to take her daughter in for a week while she’s doing her internship.
One week turns into two, then two turns into even more, and Ivy feels like Josie (that’s the daughter) is trying to steal Amy’s life for herself.
There is no doubt someone is sabotaging Amy’s career and personal life, and Amy is determined to get some answers before it’s too late.

I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t make much effort when it comes to reading synopsis. No matter how cliche it sounds, I do like to go blind in books most of the time.
I’ll even choose to read someone else’s review before I’ll read synopsis, that’s how weird (especially for a book bloggers) I am.
Yet, somehow I end up reading good books most of the time (I pick up my reads by listening to my instinct, paying attention to authors and publishers, looking at the book covers (I think that is the most important aspect tbh) and observing my twitter and goodreads feeds).

When I started Friend of the Family, I though I was reading a thriller. However, after some time, it was clear to me this was not a thriller, but very interesting and fascinating work of general fiction.
It could also be tagged as women’s fiction, in my opinion.

As soon as I began reading I fell in love. The story talked about everything I wanted to read about in that moment: magazines, modern women, rivalry, fashion and different relationships between people.

I think I can safely say that I enjoyed reading every single page of it, and if it was 200 pages longer, I probably still couldn’t get enough.

People’s relationships and their reactions are what I love reading about the most, and this book is full of those complex themes.
I really, really loved observing everything, every character’s part in the story and their attitude to each other.

We have that aspect on one hand, and on the other hand there’s a plot driven story that will make you want to read, read, and read some more. 
I am a slow reader who reads mostly in the morning, and this book made me want to get up early so I could read more, squeeze at least few pages more from what I’d usually read.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and am so glad and thankful that I have read it.
I would recommend it to readers who like stories about successful people, relationships and rivalry, with little splash of mystery and thrills.