The False Friend

From Barnes & Noble

When she was ten years old, Celia Durst did something that would seem logical only to those who can still think like a child. Out on a walk but still feuding with her best friend Djuna, Celia watched her close rival fall into a deep crevice. Instead of reporting her missing, young Durst fabricated a story of a drive-away kidnapping. Responding equally inexplicably, three other girls also claimed to have witnessed the crime. Now twenty years later, Celia decides to come clean, but she learns to her consternation that such erasures are not easily achieved. A nuanced character study by the author of the Discover Great New Writers selection Bee Season.

Mameve Medwed

…Goldberg…uses her circling, stop-and-start narrative to approach this subject in ways that are both fascinating and fresh…[she] does a crackerjack job of showing a former factory town on the wane; a family, like the town, that hasn't moved forward; and a character, also stagnating, trying to discover an elusive truth…Though Celia is not always likable…she is consistently real…[Goldberg] is a master of ambiguity. The hole at the heart of Celia's mystery waits to be filled in. With psychological shrewdness, generosity and a sure hand, Goldberg circles her way to an ending that is both satisfying and unsatisfying. Like life.
—The Washington Post

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. (Oct.)

Library Journal

The term mean girls is elevated to a new level in Goldberg's moody novel. Is there anything uglier or more damaging than the well-honed bullying techniques of middle-school girls? There's always a natural leader, and newcomer Djuna Pearson wields the power. Choosing Celia as her acolyte, Djuna designates second-tier friends, and outsider Leanne gets the brunt of their cruel teasing. For 21 years Celia manages to lock away the memories of that time, fashioning an enviable life for herself in Chicago. One day she's overwhelmed with the need to confess the lie she once told about Djuna, a falsehood that shook the solid foundation of her small town. With a deep sense of unease, readers accompany Celia on her return to Jensenville, NY, where she hopes to make amends for a transgression only she seems to be aware of. VERDICT The authenticity of the author's voice is evident when she describes the uncomfortable emotions and forgotten details that assault the adult Celia as she goes back to her childhood home. Different in theme from Goldberg's Bee Season and Wickett's Remedy, this is a layered, understated novel about the complex, ambiguous nature of memory and its effect on the dynamics of relationships. Great fodder for reading groups. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/10.]—Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL

Kirkus Reviews

Picking up the current concerns about bullying and "mean girls," Goldberg (Wickett's Remedy, 2005, etc.) follows a young woman tracking down a guilty memory from her childhood.

Celia, 32, works as a performance auditor in Chicago, where she lives with her boyfriend Huck, a teacher who is growing impatient with Celia's unwillingness to commit. Then Celia is overcome by her suppressed memory of the disappearance of her best friend Djuna in fifth grade. Eleven-year-old Celia told authorities that Djuna got into a car with a stranger, but now Celia remembers that she lied; Djuna actually fell into a hole in the woods while they were arguing. Overcome with remorse, Celia returns to her childhood home in New York, to set things right. But her shyly loving parents, who still carry their own parental guilts, assure Celia that her despair at the time of Djuna's disappearance was too real to be phony. Celia goes online to look for three other friends, Josie, Becky and Leanne, who were walking near the woods with Celia and Djuna that day. As Celia talks to each, she begins to realize that her memory may be confused. Becky saw the car pull away, and Josie saw Djuna get in it. Meanwhile other memories of her childhood come back in snippets, forcing Celia to acknowledge that her culpability may have to do with more than her friend's death. Celia notes that the mercurial friendship of arguments and reconciliations she had with Djuna was more intimate and intense than even her relationship with Huck. And their friendship centered on their tyrannical domination over the three other girls, especially Leanne, who was poorer than the others and desperate for acceptance. It seems obvious that Djuna was the ringleader until Celia makes a final, painful visit to Djuna's mother, still mourning the loss of her only child, an outsider herself before Celia befriended her.

Complex, compelling characters who defy pigeonholing override Goldberg's tendency to map out the plot too neatly.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Myla Goldberg's third novel returns her to territory that might seem strikingly familiar, demographically speaking, to readers of Bee Season, her warmly received debut novel published a decade ago. But, although both novels painstakingly construct the world of eleven-year-old girls, The False Friend's Celia Durst and her best friend, Djuna Pearson, could not be more different than Eliza Naumann, the awkward heroine who finds deliverance from her drab place in her school and family by becoming a spelling bee champion. Celia and Djuna are queen bees of a different sort, the movie stars of the grade school playground, with a fan club of awestruck hangers-on, who willingly defer to their tastes (pink and lavender, unicorns, Tretorn sneakers) and submit to their tests. They are, in a word, bullies, until a shocking intervention from the adult world outside the playground transforms Djuna from tormenter into victim: one day, while walking with five girls near the woods, she disappears into a brown car and is never seen again.

Twenty-one years later, Celia, now 32 and living in Chicago, is struck by what she believes to be a repressed memory that suggests things might have happened differently than she described, and that she might actually hold some blame for Djuna's disappearance. The next day she books a flight back to her parents' hometown of Jensenville, a once-quaint town in upstate New York where the family-owned Victorians have now been turned over to drunken students, "the real estate equivalent of inviting caterpillars into a tree." Though Celia comes as a supplicant, all her attempts to confess are muffled by her parents' impenetrable layers of good will, propriety, and stiff New England reserve. Goldberg captures perfectly the frustration of trying to talk about passion and wrongdoing in a family where the parents find it unseemly to be seen in their pajamas in front of their children and a raised voice is considered "the vocal equivalent of public frontal nudity." Huck, Celia's handsome high school teacher boyfriend of nearly a decade, pines over Celia in her absence, while wondering when she might be willing to graduate from raising dogs to raising children with him, but shares her parents' sunny view of Celia's basic goodness. "The eleven-year-old girl she described to Huck was a stranger. Only Celia recognized what she'd done."

But, as further revelations unfold, the reader comes to understand that even Celia has yet to recognize what she has really done, and to whom. She begins to grapple with the depth of cruelty of which children are capable: "The unadult mind is immune to logic or foresight, unschooled by consequence, and endowed with a biblical sense of injustice." Revisiting the territory of the past with Celia, Goldberg reminds her adult readers of the power of a claustrophobic girlhood friendship that "could only ever be a child's possession" because "only a child could withstand its stranglehold." But as she moves through the town, we see that Celia is unaware of the force field she once created in the minds of others: the unattainable beauty, the friend who left others behind, the villain whose former victims still seek vengeance, the child whose confidence boosts parental pride. These different sides, Goldberg seems to suggest, might themselves reinforce Celia's unconscious sense of the naturalness of her regal role, even as her nostalgic infatuation with Djuna blinds her to the childhood crimes for which she can truly atone.

--Amy Benfer