“It’s one of the last days before Easter. Very soon Louisa is going to be thrown out of an art auction for vandalizing a valuable painting. Old ladies will shriek and the police will come and it really wasn’t planned.”
Those are some lines from the first page of Fredrik Backman’s novel My Friends. Backman is the bestselling author of A Man Called Ove.
In My Friends, he deals with another tough topic in a brutally realistic, but empathetic way.
Louisa is a seventeen-year-old foster child and budding artist who has come to an art exhibition to see the original painting she has always loved. As she runs from the museum guards out into an alley, she meets who she thinks is a homeless man, but is, in fact, the dying artist of the painting. He sees Louisa as a kindred spirit and directs his friend Ted to give the painting to Louisa when he dies. Louisa attaches herself to Ted and over the course of a train ride, he tells her the story of how the artist came to paint the famous work.
The story is two years in the lives of four teenage friends, all from broken homes: Joar whose abusive father dealt out regular beatings, Ted whose mother was stuck grieving his father’s death, the artist (whose real name is revealed at the end of the book) whose family and art teacher didn’t recognize his talent and Ali, left to fend on her own. It’s Joar who regularly protects his friends from mean classmates and recognizes the artist’s talent ensuring that it is seen by someone who gets him into art school and on the path to fame. As the book jacket says, this novel “is a stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of art and friendship.”
If you loved A Man Called Ove, then you must read My Friends by Fredrik Backman.
