Review: My Friends by Fredrick Backman

Art is so much more than a picture inside a frame. And nothing sums up that feeling more than My Friends the latest novel by Fredrick Backman. The novel opens with Louisa, a girl who was abandoned by her mother and who ran away from her foster home after the untimely death of her very best friend Fish. Seemingly a guerrilla artist, we meet Louisa as she attends an art auction with spray paint in her backpack, but slowly the author reveals something different--a sensitive young woman who just wants to look at a famous artwork titled The One of the Sea which she knows is a painting of so much more than the sea. After all, she can see the pier and the four young people depicted in the painting. Her fascination with the painting and lack of interest in certain rules does not bode well for the other people at the auction, which soon turns into a series of unexpected events, where she encounters the artist, and the story of the four teenagers on the pier--and the birth of the career of an artist unfolds. And Louisa, it seems, might have more in common with the artist and their friends than she thinks ...

My Friends is a novel that left me with a rollercoaster of emotions. Sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes angry and occasionally delighting in the unexpected. I feel that many readers will love the friendship that develops between Louisa and Ted, and the way the former teacher becomes a guardian of sorts, but there is also much, much more to the story. (Bit like the painting, really.)

A lovely story of art and humanity.

Recommended.

Thank you to Simon and Schuster Australia for my ARC of My Friends.

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