Review by Booklist Review
The group chat is one thing, but now that she's married, Clare avoids seeing her high-school friends in person. Once together, everyone seems to regress to their worst selves. Clare knows that a week-long trip to Hawaii with the group definitely won't be stress free--they'll drink too much, sleep too little, get annoyed with each other, and end up rehashing old arguments. But a thirtieth birthday is worth celebrating. Baker (Our Little Racket, 2017) drops Clare and her close-knit group of friends into vibrant, lush Kauai, inserting a few dramatic flashbacks to Boston and Los Angeles to illustrate turning points in the friends' shared history. True to form, the group dynamics start out strong and end up fractured, every person unsure about how to reconcile their high-school selves with their adult personalities. In the vein of Netflix's Friends from College, Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings (2013), and Zoe Eisenberg's Significant Others (2024), Baker's story, filled with rapid-fire dialogue spoken by true-to-life characters, captures how devout friendship can be alternatingly reassuring and disorienting, but it's never insignificant.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Baker's underwhelming sophomore novel (after Our Little Racket), a group of 20-somethings contend with their fading friendships and their mortality during a disastrous vacation in Hawaii. After an alert pops up on their phones urging them to take shelter from an incoming missile ("This is not a drill," the message reads), Clare, an aspiring novelist, realizes she doesn't want to die with the others. Almost an hour later, their phones ping again, notifying them the warning was sent in error. Though they try to have a good time, the scare provokes difficult conservations. Clare has never been close with Jessie, the only other woman in the group, and their long-running competition spikes during the crisis. She's always felt closest to Renzo, even though his condescending nature forces her to seek his approval. There's also Mac, who used to date Jessie while they were in high school, and who makes jokes about being the only Black person in the group. The friends' conversations provide a sounding board for the author to riff on racism, climate change, and other contemporary issues--for instance, when Clare schools Jessie on anti-racist campus protestors--but the conversations barely scratch the surface. This one fizzles. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Feb.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Six longtime friends, who first met at an elite Los Angeles high school, vacation together in Hawai'i to celebrate their 30th birthdays. When they are erroneously alerted that a missile is headed for the island, the friends are forced to face the expiration date of the bonds of their youth. In this 2018-set story, Baker (Our Little Racket) weaves in some of the social issues that characterized the proceeding years, as the United States faced the fallout from the 2016 election. Over the course of six interminable days, the friends drink, eat, bicker, drink, go on a boat, hike, and reminisce about their relationship. The book is narrated from the perspective of novelist Clare, who has an affair on the vacation with her high school crush. Clare is something of an unreliable narrator, highlighting the importance of knowing who is telling the story. A lack of character development occasionally makes it difficult to track which person is speaking. VERDICT This novel leans heavily on its setting and will appeal to readers who gravitate toward dramatic relationship fiction, a sort of cross between Hanya Yanihariga's A Little Life and the 1985 Brat Pack movie St. Elmo's Fire.--Jennifer Knight
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Six friends travel to Hawaii to celebrate their 30th birthdays and, after dodging imminent death, spend their time together drinking, bickering, reaching for one another, and investigating their years of interconnection. Clare, Kyle, Renzo, Mac, Jessie, and Liam have known one another since seventh grade in L.A. They've fallen in and out of friendship and love with one another and have emerged as a (sometimes begrudgingly) inseparable unit. On this particular reunion in January 2018, they've gathered in Kyle's parents' second home on the island of Kaua'i, planning to spend the week in full-on vacation mode. Then comes an emergency text advisory: "Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawai'i…This is not a drill." After a few pages of watching the characters panic, we learn that the message was human error. The group feels its aftershocks long after that morning, though, and the anxiety it sows feeds the interpersonal reckonings that follow. Much of the richness in this novel is found in the conversations among the friends, which extend from their shared history and personal lives to politics, race, and class. Hawaii is a fitting backdrop for the more political conversations, but the relationship between the group and the land is not as fully fleshed-out as the friends' grudges and crushes. The main protagonist, Clare, spends much of the book reminiscing on years past and chewing over her writing career, marriage to her college sweetheart, and relationship with each member of the group. Baker beautifully expresses the pressures of growing older while not feeling older, as well as the comfort of being with people who knew you as an adolescent--when you were unformed and naive, as you might still feel from time to time. "When you've known people this long," Clare thinks, "when you knew them in middle school, knew their mothers and their childhood bedrooms, you can always see the ghosts at their shoulders." A delayed coming-of-age story that's both perceptive and absorbing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
