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Sunday 16 August 2020

Book Review: THE WEEKEND AWAY by Sarah Alderson

 

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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