Book Review: My Friends

📚 Book Review: My Friends

Fredrik Backman

🗓️ Publication Date: May 6, 2025

📚 My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

📚 My Review: Some books don’t just speak to you—they settle into your soul. This one completely stole my heart. I cherished every single page and didn’t want it to end. I even made myself stop reading in the middle of the night just to stretch out the experience for one more day!!

Fredrik Backman has an extraordinary gift for weaving together friendship, loss, grief, love, and hope—wrapping them all in "long stories' laughter, tears… and even farts! This book was everything. Beautifully messy and unforgettable. All the stars—then all of them again!

Thank you to Atria Books via Netgalley for the eARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

📚 Goodreads Synopsis: Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an artist herself, knows otherwise and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their difficult home lives by spending their days laughing and telling stories out on a pier. There’s Joar, who never backs down from a fight; quiet and bookish Ted who is mourning his father; Ali, the daughter of a man who never stays in one place for long; and finally, there’s the artist, a boy who hoards sleeping pills and shuns attention, but who possesses an extraordinary gift that might be his ticket to a better life. These four lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be put into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. As she struggles to decide what to do with this bequest, she embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn the story of how the painting came to be. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more she feels compelled to unleash her own artistic spirit, but happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this fresh testament to the transformative power of friendship and art