Trigger warning: Disordered eating.
So I really liked this one, though parts of it dragged. I did think that there were a couple of dropped plot points (mostly around Tristan), but thought the book was a great horror novel looking at female friendships and what is really a best friend. Be warned though, it had a lot of body horror though for people who are squeamish.
“The Return” follows 27 year old Elise who is stuck in a dead end life in Buffalo. Her other friends are doing great, especially her best friend Julie who is in Maine, newly married, and renovating a house to turn it into a B&B. Elise is thrown though when one of the friend quartet that she shares with Julie calls her up to tell her Julie is missing. Elise can’t grieve like her other two friends, Mae and Molly. Eventually a funeral/memorial is held, and then two years later, Julie returns. Julie is back with no memory, but still wanting to see her friends. Mae eventually books a trip to a hotel in the middle of nowhere for the four of them to catch up on.
The main focus of the story though is Elise telling you about who Julie is, what she meant to her, and how off the rails her life has gone (for an unknown reason until revealed). I think Elise really didn’t want to acknowledge anything with Julie, because Julie was always that one in her mind who stood up for her and she and her went kind of in the same boat, until they were not.
I think this book does a great job of inspecting female friendships. For example, it’s really plain that they four of these women know each other’s shit back and forth. But Elise and May didn’t want to confront Julie about anything. For various reasons. Frankly, the main reason why I liked Molly so much was because she was the honest broker in the friend group (there’s always one). The one who loves you, but isn’t going to let you hide the worst parts of yourself. I got frustrated at times with Elise having her head up her butt for most of the book about Julie. I also see how in a group like this, it’s really easy to always have the friends pair off into best friendships, so I think Elise was desperate to hang onto Julie until she realized her friendships with Molly and Mae have changed since she’s been gone and in a good way. I think some readers may be annoyed about that, but the women in this book are at the same age I was when I realized some of the people in my life were not for me, but were for anything that was causing me to trip up since it made them feel good. One wonders at times where would they be if Julie had never disappeared for two years? I also liked how it examined toxicity in friendship groups too.
I will add though, this is slow going as anything at first, I can see why some people talked about DNFing, and I was early on wondering what was going on and was this going to get better. It does get better.
I liked the setting of this hotel with a history that goes back a hundred plus years. I could picture the layout, each room, and sound perfectly. I am still shocked no one has tried to turn this into a movie. Looking at you Guillermo del Toro.
The ending was brutal, but I think that there were some loose threads left swinging in the wind.