Book Review: The Things We Do to Our Friends by Heather Darwent
By Doreen Sheridan
February 8, 2023
Clare came to Edinburgh looking for a new life. Now that she’s enrolled at St Andrew’s, surrounded by smart people of every set, she thinks she’s ready to make friends and forge a bright future for herself. But she also knows she has to be careful about whom she lets into her inner circle. She needs the right people, the glamorous people, even as she tolerates her much more down-to-earth roommates and, eventually, colleagues at the bar she works at in order to help make ends meet.
Tabitha and Imogen—and soon the rest of their charmed circle—seem to be exactly whom Clare is looking for. Both art history students like herself, Tabitha is dazzlingly beautiful and self-assured, while Imogen is her clever, crafty shadow. As Clare ingratiates herself with the pair, she is introduced to their other close friends. Samuel is a louche man-about-town, while Ava is aloof and cosmopolitan. Soon, to Clare’s great relief, they’ve included her in their group. A grateful Clare is all too happy:
[I]t seems odd how easily I went along with it, but you must understand, finding Tabitha and the rest of them hadn’t changed things entirely for me. I still woke up some mornings wanting to claw the skin off my face sometimes when I looked in the mirror. I would sit there and practice a natural-looking grin, or I’d frown and see the furrows in my brow. But being with them made me feel like I was part of something. I craved them when I wasn’t there with them. When I saw them look toward each other and share secret glances, I was desperate to be involved. When I heard someone talking about them, I felt almost drunk on the sense of superiority that came with being who we were.
The more entangled Clare becomes with the Shiver (as she silently calls them, after a grouping of sharks,) the more she gets swept up into Tabitha’s machinations. For Tabitha has her sights set well past graduation and life in Edinburgh. Her plan for securing the Shiver’s future requires Clare to be their missing piece. Even as besotted as she is with her new friends, Clare hesitates… until it’s made clear that at least some members of the Shiver know about the past she’s spent so much time and effort trying to obscure.
At first, the plan doesn’t ask too much of her. But when things go wrong, and the Shiver’s efforts to right things make everything go from bad to worse, Clare finds herself trying to escape the very people she’d spent so long trying to befriend. Worse, all the impulses she’s worked so hard to tame come roaring back:
It’s the sense of being wronged. When I think that someone has mistreated me, it’s not something I can forget and move on from. It was manageable at that point because I had worked hard not to let things affect me like they used to. I could rein it all back in with my carefully formulated tricks. There was no one to punish anymore.
Alas for her self-control, she’s now been wronged once more. Caught between her so-called friends and her freedom, what will Clare do in order to forge her own path into the future?
There were a lot of interesting ideas going on in The Things We Do to Our Friends, Heather Darwent’s debut novel. I’m a sucker for books about toxic female friendships, especially with a dark academia setting. Ms Darwent brings an imaginative blend of jet-setting glamor and sheer grotesquery into her tale of college relationships gone awry, with the added bonus of Clare being anything but an ingenue sucked into a dangerously alluring whirlwind. Clare has her own awful, closely held secrets, that may be the only things that allow her to survive the clutches of a sociopath in this unique melange of a novel.
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It sounds like The Things We Do to Our Friends is a compelling read that explores the complex dynamics of toxic female friendships within the context of dark academia. The author, Heather Darwent, brings a unique blend of jet-setting glamor and grotesquery to the story, while also presenting the protagonist, Clare, as a flawed character with secrets of her own. The novel seems to offer a fresh take on the genre and promises to be a gripping and suspenseful read.