My Best Friend Was Angela Bennett
In this novel, at times emotionally charged and physically graphic, the reader is drawn into the lives of two female friends as they navigate a stressed geopolitical reality. Dark personal descriptions play out in an environment that is not conducive to gender equality, with its overarching patriarchal society stuck in a restrictive past that resists change.
Longtime friends Dorothy and Angela have been raised in isolated Newfoundland, which is shaped by its own stilted history, with limited engaging life choices for women. Amid this atmosphere, the two attempt to find their own safe places. They struggle with family traditions, situational norms, gender expectations, World War One memories, and economic realities, as well as with their own emerging aspirations.
“There are other things I’ll be doing to you. You must try to adjust, to make friends, with the pain.” Readers are immersed in the horrific world of sadism within a marriage. Resolutions are few, and escape seems impossible. Occurring over the period from World War Two through the following decades, this is a most compelling tale that juxtaposes real-life struggles against the contemporary political uncertainties wrought by war and its inevitable, evolving consequences.
In reality, lives do not always reach a pleasant resolution, and so it is with Dottie and Angie. There is indeed personal progress, a denouement of sorts, but at costs that some readers may find unsettling.
