The False Friend

From Publishers Weekly Goldberg's unremarkable latest, a neatly constructed if hollow story of memory and deception, begins in the woods surrounding a small upstate New York town, as 11-year-old Celia watches her best friend, Djuna, get into a stranger's car, never to be seen again. At least that's the story Celia gives to the police. Twenty-one years later, Celia returns to her hometown to tell her family and old friends what really happened that fateful day, but her new version of the disappearance is met with disbelief by family and old friends. Meanwhile, Celia's image of her childhood identity is shattered as she listens to descriptions of herself as a child: she was sweet to some, cruel and bullying to others. Goldberg successfully evokes the shades of gray that constitute truth and memory, but her tendency toward self-conscious writerliness and grand pronouncements ("The unadult mind is immune to logic or foresight, unschooled by consequence, and endowed with a biblical sense of justice") prevents the narrative from breaking through its muted tones. Goldberg misplays the setup, trading psychological suspense for a routine story of self-discovery. Copyright В© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Celia Durst decides, after 20 years, to come clean. At the age of 10, she was responsible for the disappearance of her unpredictable best friend, Djuna. Traipsing with their girlhood clique through an unfamiliar forest, only Celia saw Djuna fall into a hole in the ground, but hot-headed from the fight the two were having, she decided to tell everyone that Djuna was picked up by a stranger. Now thirtysomething and successful, Celia leaves Chicago to replant herself in her childhood home and confess to her family and the other girls involved. It turns into an agonizing process, however, when no one believes CeliaвЂTMs “new” story—especially not the other three girls, who all claim to have seen the car Djuna got into. Newly obsessed with knowing what she was like as a child, Celia spends the bulk of the novel imploring her 10-year-old self to manifest at her side, but she first must realize what the younger Celia lost that day in the forest. Readers are kept guessing until the final pages and, as in Bee Season (2000), Goldberg uses beautiful, emotionally descriptive language to keep us with one ear to the ground, listening for the slow, quiet footsteps of creeping tragedy. --Annie Bostrom