I didn’t know what to expect when I picked up Before We Were Innocent. I bought it during a late-night book binge and forgot that I had even purchased it until it showed up in a box on my front step, along with four other novels. I had grabbed it solely because of the Reese’s Book Club sticker on the front. I wasn’t sure which novel to start with, and I was hesitant to start with this one because it involved three very entitled teenagers from Calabasas and I didn’t think I’d be able to relate to the story at all. In this case, however, I was pleasantly surprised.
A summer in Greece for three best friends ends in the unthinkable when only two return home. . . .from the author of the Read With Jenna pick The Comeback.
Ten years ago, after a sun-soaked summer spent in Greece, best friends Bess and Joni were cleared of having any involvement in their friend Evangeline’s death. But that didn’t stop the media from ripping apart their teenage lives like vultures.
While the girls were never convicted, Joni, ever the opportunist, capitalized on her newfound infamy to become a motivational speaker. Bess, on the other hand, resolved to make her life as small and controlled as possible so she wouldn’t risk losing everything all over again. And it almost worked. . . .
Except now Joni needs a favor, and when she turns up at her old friend’s doorstep asking for an alibi, Bess has no choice but to say yes. She still owes her. But as the two friends try desperately to shake off their past, they have to face reality.
Can you ever be an innocent woman when everyone wants you to be guilty?
Book Description of Before We Were Innocent
The Crime
Before We Were Innocent is almost voyeuristic in the way it is written. We follow Bess, a woman who is deeply haunted by the death of her friend ten years earlier. Her friend, Evangeline, died in Greece during a trip that Bess and her and their friend, Joni, had taken together. The circumstances around the death were so sudden and shocking that Bess and Joni are deeply traumatized, but moreover, the fact that they become the number one suspects in the case that may or may not have been an accident becomes even more traumatizing.
The story itself is very reminiscent of the murder of Meredith Kercher, the story in which her roommate Amanda Knox is implicated in the crime and then crucified in the media for behaving in a way that most people wouldn’t expect. In this novel, the surviving girls have their entire lives dissected and judged by the entire world. Everything from text messages about who they have slept with to photos of them in wild, drunken moments are exposed.
We read two perspectives on the story, ten years after the fact in 2018 and when the events were taking place in 2008. In the later timeline, Joni is put under the spotlight again when her partner, Willa, goes missing. And we learn about the lie that Joni and Bess told after Evangeline died that has bound them together for life.
But this story is about a lot more than just the crime that takes place, it’s about the friendship that facilitated it. There is such a human realness to the way that these three girls interact with each other. I can see mirrors of it in almost every female friendship that I had as a teenager. As the author puts it in the Behind the Book section at the back, “The power struggles, the jealousy, the bravado, the love–everything felt so critical. I decided then to write a story of female friendship in all its gore and its glory, all the ways we test each other and the ways we show our love.”
These moments, where the girls are both there for each other and turning against each other, sometimes in the same moment, are so real. It’s heartbreaking and wholesome and tragic.
A Friendship That Feels So Real — It Stings
And not to make this about me (I mean, this is my blog, after all), but the story reminded me of a time when I bumped into my middle school friends years later, in an Ulta. I had comforted one of these friends when her older brother had a baby with a girl in high school and the family drama that ensued from this. I remember listening intently to her concerns and frustrations with the situation and how it affected her family. I had felt close to her, back when we were fourteen. So you can imagine my surprise when I was outright rejected by them in the too-bright lights of the Ulta. I was pushing a baby stroller in frumpy new-mom clothes and she was with our old friend group that I had long since fallen out of. I excitedly went up to them, asking them how they were. At first, they gave me looks of pity, then they giggled, then they whispered in each other’s ears as though I didn’t exist. “Oh… you have… a baby?” one of them said, barely containing her judgment of me behind a snide look and a giggle. I felt so alienated at that moment, but it didn’t bother me as much as it once would have. While at first, I was shocked to be met with such blatant cruelty, I remembered that moment, years before, with my friend and her family drama. I understood that, to her, having a baby when you were young was the biggest mistake you could make. I understood that, in some ways, this friend group had always treated me that way.
I was reminded of the moments that I had pushed out of my mind in favor of kinder ones, like when they pushed me down in the hallway and made my books fly everywhere (a real Disney moment, to be honest,) or when they told my crush that I was lovesick when I absolutely did not want them to. I had always been that girl that they picked on to make themselves feel better and in that frustrating moment in Ulta, I realized that they had not changed. But I had and my life was in a completely different spot than theirs. I was over the moon with my new baby and didn’t feel ashamed or embarrassed to have taken that route in life at all. So, while I understood their response to seeing me that way, it didn’t cut me the same way.
So, why would I bring up such an embarrassing moment in my life? Well, I’m just embarrassingly transparent (a quote from the book) and it also made me realize the contrast between how critical those moments feel when you are a teenager and how, as you get older, they feel so small in comparison. I hadn’t thought about those friends in a long time and somehow after reading this book, I felt more sympathy for them than contempt. Maybe I wasn’t humiliated in an Ulta. Maybe they were.
Ella Berman does an excellent job of capturing the duality of teenage friendships. Honestly, the way that she describes (literally) everything in this book is so well done. Take, for instance, this quote from one of the girls about their relationship with their parents:
“No, for some entirely inexplicable reason, my parents not only chose each other, but they also chose to have me, presumably the result of either some drunken accident or an ill-advised bet, and now my dad has beaten the system by kindly unchoosing to have me.”
Page 71, Before We Were Innocent
Ella Berman does such an excellent job of cutting through your pretenses about teenagers and making their heartbreak not feel trivial at all. In fact, when they are broken, you feel it right along with them. She creates three distinct characters, something that can be hard to do when they are all the same age and from similar backgrounds, and each is relatable in its own way.
The tension in this novel pulls you in and makes you want to devour it in just a few hours. For me, it took only 2 days to read it cover-to-cover and this meant I even had to put off watching a few episodes of a show that I had been looking forward to. I needed to get to the end of the book!
I wanted to share this quote too, which out of context might not feel so powerful, but that brought me to tears. There was so much tension leading up to this moment, so much secondhand anxiety about how it would go when these two characters meet, that I felt moved right along with Bess in this moment. And I instantly loved Sophia. This is just one example of how Berman’s writing style can make small moments feel overpowering and how her attention to detail makes the book almost addictive.
“When she sees me, she tilts her head to one side in gentle recognition before she reaches out and pulls me in toward her. She holds me for what feels like an inordinate amount of time, and I’m already blinking back tears when I feel something brush against my leg. I look down to find two German shepherds circling us, creating a living barrier between us and the rest of the world. ‘Bess,’ Sophia says. ‘I’ve heard so much about you.”
Page 355-356, Before We Were Innocent
The End
The ending in this book might be somewhat controversial. For me, the ending was perfect. It is open-ended in some ways, but the character arc is complete. Bess’s transformation throughout the novel was really the most important aspect to me and we see her go through so much. The ending is less about what happened to Evangeline or Willa, and more about how we choose to move on from the unfixable things in our lives. Bess can’t get a do-over with the decisions she made in Greece and she can’t change what happened to her friend. She can only move on from it and find a way to be herself again, even if she doesn’t feel like she deserves to.
I took a look at the reviews on Goodreads and there are quite a few people that say they did not finish it or that it was boring. Some people are offended by the relationships in the book. All of this is valid for those readers, but I didn’t feel that way about the book. I think if you look at it from the perspective that it’s a book about the relationships and about the characters more than a thriller/suspense novel and if you can enjoy the push-pull of those relationships, then I think you will enjoy this book. I think if you had toxic relationships in high school, you will get it. But I can see why this book wouldn’t be for everyone.
This book doesn’t flow at a break-neck (sorry, not sorry) pace like you might anticipate a thriller to do. But I think it’s definitely worth a read and I would definitely pick up a novel by Ella Berman again.
There are also some interesting discussion questions at the end of the book. If you are looking for a book club read, this would be a good book to do that with because there is a lot of nuance and the ending is open to interpretation. What happened to Joni in the end might feel frustrating or it might feel like the perfect conclusion, depending on who you ask.
0 Comments