There’s a moment quite late in Four Weekends and a Funeral that pushed this contemporary romance from a 4 to a 5 star read. For a good chunk of the book, grief and guilt have been bubbling under the surface of Ali’s life. Several things come to a head and she has an emotional moment in The Mall of America, followed by an intervention by her two best friends. Ellie Palmer gives Ali this moment in the aftermath that beautifully captures friendship.
We eat too many waffles, and I’m consumed by that fizzy, silly feeling I only have around my best friends—that intoxicating invincibility of being known, understood, and loved as the most beautiful, brilliant idiot the world has ever seen.
Four Weekends and a Funeral starts with the funeral. Ali’s ex boyfriend has died suddenly in a car accident. Ali and Sam hadn’t dated long, and though he had broken up with her, he wanted to stay friends. At the funeral, Sam’s sister tells her that Sam had not told their parents that he had broken up with Ali, and would she mind not telling them? This act of kindness immediately has the unintended consequence of roping Ali into spending the next four weekends helping Sam’s best friend clear out Sam’s apartment. Sam’s best friend, Adam, is grumpy, taciturn, and seems to dislike Ali.
One of the things Ellie Palmer does beautifully here is illustrate the webs of interconnectedness in Ali’s life. Ali, Adam, Sam, and Ali’s mother gain nuance as the book moves on. Ali’s mother survived breast cancer, which prompted Ali to be tested for the BRCA gene, which then prompted her to get a preventative double mastectomy. Ali has a lot of grief and guilt related to cancer, her mastectomies, and being a homebody. She thought Sam would fix that for her, making her be more adventurous. But Sam had his own struggles with living authentically. One of the ways he dealt with it was pushing people he cared about to do things, which was creating a wedge in his friendship with Adam. Palmer reveals all this with so much care and empathy. And fear not, there is a lot of humor mixed in with the grief.
I’m really excited that I have an arc of Palmer’s next book, Anywhere With You on my tablet.