"Friends Forever"

Friends Forever by Danielle Steel, Performed by Nick Podehl, AF, 2012, Playaway digital audio book, 8hrs, rating=2
Source:  library

Two girls and three boys, all with strikingly different looks and talents, meet at the Atwood school as young children. Together, they become an inseparable group - known to outsiders as "The Big Five" - and lean on one another through all the bumps and bends of childhood and adolescence. But when the tight-knit group graduates and scatters to different colleges, their lives diverge dramatically, and some of the friends are lost forever... Those who remain will struggle to understand that even bonds that once seemed unbreakable are not proof against tragedy - but that they can also transform into something new and entirely unexpected... (Goodreads)

This is definitely not a Christmas read!  Not that it was advertised to be one but just letting you know that it was not a jolly book.  Quite depressing actually.  It practically didn't let up.  I was hanging on to the hope that there will be a happy ending.  Well, let's just say that I was so dispirited that it would have taken an amazingly, over-top ending to snap me out of my displeased trance. 

The premise was sweet enough, from kindergarten to adulthood these five individuals demonstrated the important bond lifelong friends can have.  In between were rough trials that tested their friendship and relationships with their parents and siblings.  Overall with a theme of examining a generational age prone to self destruction or tragedies.  Usually that kind of look in life is right up my alley but I didn't buy it here.  There was something about the storytelling that just didn't quite pierce into me.  There were several heart wrenching moments that should have but they felt superficial instead.  The repetitiveness didn't help as well but rather became somewhat annoying. 

Bless Mr. Podehl's heart because he did a great job at narrating but it was the script that just didn't allow him to convey depth.

This wasn't an awful book because there were tender moments and complex relationships worth exploring.  Perhaps that's part of the problem, too many things were going on.