Review: Girls' Night Out

Girls' Night Out by Liz Fenton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A beautiful, haunting story of friendship and what happens when that friendship is put to the test. A must-read for women of all ages!!!

Girls’ Night Out by Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke is a gripping tale of friendship and the cracks that form over time. This book reminds me a bit of what makes Liane Moriarty successful—it’s a deep character study of women and their lives both separate to and in relation to one another, and with a dash of suspense. Readers will find themselves turning the pages, wanting to find out the hidden secrets of these three women that will answer the question, what happened to their friendship??

From the outside Ashley has everything a girl could want —a handsome husband, two lovely daughters, a successful business, a 7,000 square-foot home in California, stunning good looks, and a magnetic personality. But these things that Ashley has that make her enviable also make it hard for her to connect with even those she loves most. Since college Ashley has been best friends with Lauren and Natalie. Now that they are turning 40, the cracks have formed in their friendship. Desperate to save them, Ashley invites her friends on a girls’ trip to Tulum—to reconnect and hopefully say the things they’ve been unable to say for so long.

Natalie sometimes feels like the sidekick —she is Ashley’s best friend and business partner. It was Natalie’s idea to create the BlowBrush—a combination brush and blow dryer with a patented battery that makes the hair styling process easy for all women. But it was Ashley that used her charms to get the BlowBrush as successful as it is. Now with a huge offer from Revlon to purchase their company, Natalie is ready to get out. The only problem is convincing Ashley to do the same. This argument has caused a divide between the two women, but Natalie is not telling Ashley the real reason she wants to sell the company—the secret she has been keeping from the world. Natalie agrees to the girls’ trip thinking it may give her an opportunity to convince Ashley to sell, but will she be able to tell Ashley the truth?

Lauren feels like the third wheel —she isn’t in business with Ashley and Natalie, and she isn’t sure she really has a friendship with Natalie outside of Ashley. Lauren is recently widowed and dealing with her own demons. And something happened between Lauren and Ashley a year ago that has caused them to stop speaking altogether. But Lauren wants to try to reconnect; she wants to try to forgive Ashley. But that may also mean forgiving herself, and facing some darkness she has held onto that she would rather avoid.

The trip is meant to reestablish their friendship —but the reality is, that the secrets they keep and the pain that each other has caused may be difficult to repair. The trip isn’t going at all as planned. And then one night Ashley goes missing, and the torment between the three women is suddenly forgotten… Where is Ashley???

Every woman knows what it is like to feel like the third wheel in a group of three. What’s interesting about the way Liz and Lisa wrote this book is that at times, all three of these women are convinced they are the one left out—the one that is not connecting as well. The authors write masterfully the way our own neuroses contribute to this disconnect. When we should be relaxing and letting people in, we get in our heads about feeling left out, and this increases the space between us.

As the book unfolds, you’ll be convinced you know who the problem is. You’ll see the story told from each woman’s perspective. What I love, though, is that the further in you get, the more you realize that each of them has contributed in equal parts to the situation they are in now. Sometimes its easy to see the other people as at fault, but there are things all of us do to alienate others. Getting over our own demons is needed to be able to not only forgive others, but ask them to forgive us as well. Forgiveness may be the most important theme of this novel, followed closely by secrets. We all have things we are too afraid for others to know. And sometimes revealing those things to the ones closest to us is the hardest thing of all.

Many thanks to Lake Union Publishing, Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke, and to NetGalley for an opportunity to read this book in advance of publication in exchange for an honest review.

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