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Title: Just Last Night
Author: Mhairi McFarlane
Sub-genre: Contemporary/women’s fiction
Publication Date: May 4, 2021
Content Warnings: death of a friend, identification of body; child abuse off page
Not going to lie, when I read the first chapter of this one, I almost put it down. Not because the writing was bad, but because it is clear from the first page this is a book about grief, and I wasn’t sure I was in the right head space for it. But I pushed through, and I’m really glad I did.
Eve and Susie have been best friends since childhood. Along with their pals Ed and Justin, the foursome have been intrinsically woven together for most of their adult lives. Eve has always been in love with Ed, but keeping her feelings hidden is the only secret she’s ever kept from the group. Little does she know, it’s most definitely not the only secret. The tight knit group of friends is turned upside down when Susie is hit by a car and killed (this happens very early on in the book). Eve and Ed are left to handle most of the formalities as Susie’s dad is suffering from dementia and her brother lives in a different country. Susie and her brother Fin never got along, so when he returns home to take care of arrangements for his sister, the group of friends treat him hostilely, at best. But when Susie’s dad disappears, Fin calls on Eve to help him locate his father as Eve is one of the few people the dad still recognizes and responds too. On the trip, and in the aftermath of her best friend’s death, Eve learns she didn’t know everything about the person she thought she was closest to. Some of the secrets threaten to tear her friends apart, while others might just bring Eve and Fin together. Though the bulk of this book deals with the heaviness of grief and the trauma of losing someone, it does end with an HEA.
I think even if you haven’t personally lost anyone in the past year, you’ve probably thought more about death than you ever had before. I know I have. And because of that, I expected to not enjoy reading this book, but honestly, the opposite was true. It almost felt cathartic? The writing is so gorgeous and heartfelt, and the characters so well drawn, that I felt like I was experiencing their grief with them. And that definitely had moments of feeling heavy and hard, but there was also this moment at the end of hey, we can get through this. The quality of the writing here was so high and the prose so well done that it was one of those books that made my heart physically clench. I really think even if you were hesitant to read a grief book right now, that if you picked this one up, it would still be a phenomenal read.
Overall Rating: 5 stars
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