Best Friends For Never by Adrienne Maria Vrettos (review)

Her family’s recent move to a small Massachusetts town isn’t nearly as bad as Hattie feared. Nonetheless, when the town’s annual Harvest Festival—and its accompanying jinx on those who make promises they can’t keep—results in a Groundhog Day scenario where her friends meet her for the first time every day, Hattie’s understandably distressed, and she must rely on two unlikely allies to navigate and break the curse. It’s an intriguing but thin premise, with the execution requiring real effort from readers to make sense of plot developments, even as they enjoy Hattie’s journey back to herself. Though the book foreshadows the conclusion with some success, some revelations along the way, such as Hattie’s homesickness for Brooklyn, come implausibly out of the blue, and the slapdash resolutions prove unsatisfying (it turns out that all those weeks Hattie suffered under the curse seem to her friends “like they lasted only as long as a hiccup”). Still, for those wanting a vaguely supernatural Halloween tale, or those needing a reminder that real friends won’t care if you wear cat t-shirts, this book will entertain.