Book Review: The Mutual Friend by Carter Bays
The Mutual Friend by Carter Bays
Publisher: Dutton
Publication Date: June 7, 2022
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
From the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother, a hilarious and thought-provoking debut novel set in New York City, following an unforgettable cast of characters as they navigate life, love, loss, ambition, and spirituality—without ever looking up from their phones
It’s the summer of 2015, and Alice Quick needs to get to work. She’s twenty-eight years old, grieving her mother, barely scraping by as a nanny, and freshly kicked out of her apartment. If she can just get her act together and sign up for the MCAT, she can start chasing her dream of becoming a doctor . . . but in the Age of Distraction, the distractions are so distracting. There’s her tech millionaire brother’s religious awakening. His picture-perfect wife’s emotional breakdown. Her chaotic new roommate’s thirst for adventure. And, of course, there’s the biggest distraction of all: love.
From within the story of one summer in one woman’s life, a tapestry of characters is unearthed, tied to one another by threads both seen and unseen. Filled with all the warmth, humor, and heart that gained How I Met Your Mother its cult following, The Mutual Friend captures in sparkling detail the chaos of contemporary life—a life lived simultaneously in two different worlds, the physical one and the one behind our screens—and reveals how connected we all truly are.
The Mutual Friend was a funny, yet scarily realistic look at how much social media and the internet control our lives and distract us. I chose it because it’s written by the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother and I love that show.
Alice Quick posted on Facebook three years ago that she was going to medical school. It’s time for her to bite the bullet and actually study for and take the MCAT. After all, tons of people liked that post. But there are so many distractions, like making the perfect Spotify playlist for when she is studying. Her new roommate Roxy, who has the attention span of a gnat and her nose permanently in her phone, is not helping. She is always twisting Alice’s arm to go to a party or somewhere else.
There are a lot of supporting characters too. It’s one of those books where you know they all end up being tied to each other in one way or another even though it doesn’t seem like it at first. The connections the author made between them were really clever. The internet is a small world!
This book was my book club’s May selection and it got mixed reviews. A couple of us – like me – loved it. Others thought it was too slow. I thought it started out slow but drew me in as I kept reading. I could totally relate to Alice and Roxy – I have a social media addiction that I’m constantly fighting. TikTok is my latest obsession! I’m glad I put my phone down long enough to read this book.
Recommended.
