Title: THE WEEKEND AWAY
Author: Sarah Alderson
Publisher: Avon Books UK
Read: August 2020
Expected publication: out now
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟
Book Description:
Two friends go on holiday. Only one comes back.
Orla and Kate have been best friends forever. Together they’ve faced it all – be it Orla’s struggles as a new mother or Kate’s messy divorce. And whatever else happens in their lives, they can always look forward to their annual weekend away.
This year, they’re off to Lisbon: the perfect flat, the perfect view, the
perfect itinerary. And what better way to kick things off in style than with
the perfect night out?
But when Orla wakes up the next morning, Kate is gone. Brushed off by the
police and with only a fuzzy memory of the night’s events, Orla is her friend’s
only hope. As she frantically retraces their steps, Orla makes a series of
shattering discoveries that threaten everything she holds dear. Because while
Lisbon holds the secret of what happened that night, the truth may lie closer
to home…
What attracted me to this book:
I bet you’ve all been there at one
time or another and thought that a holiday with a best friend would be a fun
idea. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes you find out
some things about your bestie that you would never have guessed. Which makes
for a pretty good premise for a novel, doesn’t it?
My musings:
In the Russian roulette of bestie trips away, Orla
was definitely on a losing streak. It’s obvious from Day 1 that whilst Orla has
been living under a rock for the last twenty or so years of her life, best
friend Kate has gone the other extreme. Travelling with a stash of drugs in her
toiletry bag she is fully set on a weekend of partying and sleeping with random
men, and she won’t take no for an answer when Orla pleads tiredness and a
preference for an early night in her own bed. Things soon go from bad to worse
as Orla succumbs to her spiked drink at the night club and comes to in her own
bed – but with male company, and Kate nowhere to be found. I let you imagine
the rest. Or, if you feel like a girls-trip-gone-wrong nightmare, pick up the
book for yourself to find out more!
Even though the beachy book cover
was deceiving – there wasn’t a beach mentioned anywhere in the story, and Orla
was too busy agonising over her drunken escapades and her search for the
missing Kate to even contemplate donning her cozzie – the Portugese setting
immediately appealed to my travel starved mind. However, it wasn’t the sort of
travel I had in mind. I would have preferred roaming Lisbon’s street and
admiring the architecture and people watching in picturesque cafes rather than drudging
through sleazy nightclubs to locate the missing bestie, but in times of
quarantine beggars can’t be choosers, right? Even though I was somewhat
comforted that at least the dodgy airbnb experience has been avoided this year.
But I digress. THE WEEKEND AWAY was for me what some bloggers have termed a
“popcorn read”, i.e. sit back with a glass of wine and some popcorn and enjoy
watching the characters stumble headlong into disaster.
Books like this work best with
characters that fit certain stereotypes and which you can picture quite clearly
in your mind, just as if they were projected there onto the big screen. Orla,
the anxious and naive forty-something first time mum who follows her extroverted
worldly friend around trustingly. It was a bit strange that she was blissfully
unaware of Kate’s real nature whilst everyone else in her life had no illusions
about that whatsoever! Kate, divorcee, party-girl, rule breaker, and not as
trustworthy as Orla thinks. Konstantin, a Bosnian uber driver with a
Schwarzenegger-ish physique and accent to boot, who is taking little Orla under
his wings. A creepy airbnb landlord. A couple of suspicious Portugese
detectives. It all worked well to entertain and to lead us down the garden path
to a somewhat surprising finale. It would have been more surprising had it been
left to my own inept detective skills, but a Sherlock in our buddy read group
pointed out the likely culprit very early on and was proven right in the end - *applause*.
Summary:
All in all, THE WEEKEND AWAY was a fast,
entertaining popcorn read that made for the perfect buddy read as we all enjoyed
comparing theories. Of course mine was way off, but that didn’t make it any
less fun. Personally, I would have liked a bit more sense of place and a couple
of things niggled me (such as Konstantin’s perfect and well articulated
dialogue when it was pointed out several times that he struggled with English),
but in the end I went with the flow and enjoyed the journey anyway. Choose it
for those times when you don’t want anything too in-depth and are just craving
some good entertainment. Thank you to #thechestnutgals for choosing another fun
group read!
Thank
you to Netgalley and Avon Books UK for the free electronic copy of this novel and
for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.
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