24 The False Friend

Episode 24 is now up!

It's about Myla Goldberg's novel The False Friend. I wrote it up ages ago so you can read that here.

But read the novel instead! It's available via ebook so you don't even need to acquire stuff. HIGHLY recommended.

It follows Code Name Verity logically in that it's about best friends but also it's about narrative we can't trust, though for very different reasons. Such a good book. 

Update: rereading the novel, I'm surprised to find that I had forgotten nearly all of it. Very funny in a book about memory. Also, the main character is outrageously self-involved, which comes across slowly, but ultimately seems to be what's ruining her life--all of that stemming from the day she lost her best friend, Djuna. 

A friend and I were just talking about this, how it's not the emotion that gets you, it's the maladaptive coping mechanism that you evolve to avoid having to feel it again. I'm only about a third of the way through, but Celia seems to be keeping everyone in the world at sixteen arms' lengths to avoid that kind of loss again. It's very human, but very bad for her. 

I can't believe I forgot so much about this book. This is like forgetting that Code Name Verity took place in WWII. Or had planes.  

The last few pages of the novel absolutely made my hair stand on end. It's the most chilling thing in the world, to realize how much you've misread someone, and to see them for who they really are. To see all their casual cruelty and understand a world of cause and effect you had no vocabulary for twenty years earlier. The person dunking a cookie into a coffee cup that isn't there completely freaked me out. You know that moment when someone you're talking to slips up and reveals they're not all there, or they believe something truly bizarre, or their understanding of reality is wildly different from the rest of ours? It's that. 

Myla! She's so good at what she does!

ALSO: I mentioned my friend Sumara's website, where you can find an amazing voice actress! One of her audiobook samples is a book I started years and years ago about the god Apollo. Visit her at sumarameers.com! Click portfolio and scroll down to audiobooks. It's the first one, the last example in that one. 

I hear there are going to be more audiobook reading samples of my books to come. I am SO EXCITED! It's astonishing to hear my own words this way, especially from someone with such a lovely voice.