THE GIRLFRIEND'S CLUB
Simon and Schuster, May 2002, 22.00, 319 pp.
ISBN 0684873877
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They haven been the best of friends for thirty-nine years and on Mary Sue's forty-fifth birthday, they celebrate it at the lake cabin of Dixie's father's. It is a bittersweet time for them as well as Pamela and Gretchen because the next day Mary Sue is going in for a radical mastectomy. Mary Sue's boyfriend Walter is supposed to show up but when Dixie calls him he says he is not coming.
Dixie, knowing how hurt Mary Sue will be, blackmails Walter into coming but when he arrives, Mary Sue is drunk and unconscious. Walter trips while arguing with Dixie and Gretchen, and breaks his neck. To spare them all embarrassment, the women put him in his car and roll it into the lake. During the following year, heartache, happiness and sorrow hit the women, but mostly Walter's death hangs over THE GIRLFRIENDS' CLUB like the Sword of Damocles
Readers who are fans of Belva Plain and Barbara Delinsky will want to read THE GIRLFRIEND'S CLUB. The story is a realistic depiction about four women who let nothing get in the way of their friendship though the reasoning behind burying Walter in the lake seems shaky in spite of the quartet suffering from shock. This very gritty novel doesn't have a happily ever after ending but it is a book that will satisfy anyone who has known pain in their life, which is just about everyone.
Harriet Klausner
The review of this Book prepared by Harriet Klausner
