Never Just Friends

By: Lily Craig

Narrated by: Emily Beresford

Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

Falling for your best friend is hard.

Georgiana - Georgie to everyone outside her family - figured out long ago that being in love with your straight best friend sucks. Turns out it's even worse when that friend, Madelyn, tells you she's not so straight after all. After it becomes clear to Georgie that she needs to get over Madelyn, Georgie moves cities and starts a new job.

To grad student Madelyn, though, the sudden rift between the friends prompts painful introspection. A year later, she realizes her feelings for Georgie are romantic after all. Madelyn plans to use their annual winter cabin getaway to confess her love.

But Canadian winters are unpredictable. When Madelyn and Georgie are snowed into their cabin in the woods, the two are forced into difficult conversations that confront deeply felt emotions about the past, present, and future. Can the friends find common ground after all they've been through?

Contains mature themes.

©2019 Lily Craig (P)2019 Tantor

It was a very confusing story and not convincing

If this story was about two 19 year olds it would be more believable. Dear god if grown women were really like this they need to grow up. To me, Georgie is a complete a**hole and Madelyn needs to grow the Fu*k up. I totally didn’t buy into their love. The narration didn’t help the story at all.

A Best Friend Is Forever

Georgie and Madalynn have been best friends since kindergarten. Georgie is gay and hiding her love for Madalynn. Life gets complicated when and hope for a new relationship makes a winter getaway very dicey. Erotic romance. Great performance. Recommend.

Eventually I liked this book

I started the ok when I got it, but I couldn’t get into it so I read many other books, yesterday I decided to go back to it, and immediately I got into the story and I loved it.
Never give up

Okay book, poor narration

The book was every trope imaginable but still an okay story. The narration was not very convincing and took away from the book.

Just my opinion

Emily Beresford is always great.

BEWARE OF POSSIBLE SPOILERS

Before I get into what I did not like let me say that the ending of this story is wonderful and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Once I got through the story and was able to put all the pieces together and was able to put myself in Georgie’s mental state, I was able to understand her feelings and reactions much better but it did not make my first listen any better. This is not billed as a mystery it is billed as a romance.

I found this to be a very confusing listen the first time through for about 4 hours and it could have been a very enjoyable listen with a little more information on the relationship up front especially and specifically from Georgie’s point of view. If this book had been entirely from Madelyn’s point of view, which most of it was, some confusion regarding Georgie’s reactions could be understandable but a lot was left out or incorrectly placed in the book regarding Georgie’s viewpoint in my opinion.

While I do enjoy figuring out a good mystery this book is billed as a romance not a mystery but figuring Georgie out and the reason these two lifelong friends are in this emotional situation should not take an entire book to figure out.

The Publisher’s Summary and the way Georgie reacts make no sense to me unless after moving away from Madelyn she has found another love but from what she says she has not. This confusing summary made the book even more confusing to me. The flashbacks showed how these two women became lifelong friends and grew to care for each other but really did not provide me with enough insight into the current situation until the last one.

This book would have been so much better if how these two women got to their current emotional situation had been better explained early in the book. Sure, it is clear they are friends and one has known they were lesbian since a very early age and the other has felt they were straight until recently but that is all and it so confuses me as to how these flashbacks really fit in other than the obvious except for the last one, which should have been the first in order to give some explanation on the current state of affairs.

The whole premise of the book from the summary is that Georgie is in love with her lifelong straight best friend and that she has moved to another city to try and get over being in love with her. Now a year later after Madelyn has come to terms with her own feelings toward women and her feelings for Georgie specifically. When Madelyn admits to Georgie that she is in love with her why does Georgie react with anger? When that happened it made me think Georgie has more problems than an inner emotional conflict but some mental issues as well and my thoughts of “mental issues” increases with her reaction to the friends talking about a bet because nothing up to that point even hinted at that type of reaction.

I did not care for the way Georgie reacted to Madelyn’s admission to loving her without some reason for that reaction. It seems the author left something out that would explain such an angry reaction to a lifelong friend admitting their love especially when the love of friendship had already been there for years. As it turns out the author did not leave the reason out but put it in a flashback later in the book, the one that in my opinion should have been the first flashback.

This book is billed as a romance not a mystery but figuring Georgie out and the reason these two lifelong friends are in emotional turmoil should not take an entire book to fill the reader (listener) in that Georgie’s issue stems from something Madelyn said when she discovered she was into women.

Maybe the author intended the (listeners) readers confusion throughout the book, if so in my opinion it was not a good decision.

Awkward disasters...and then they lost their backbone

A decent premise with a great start but then got mired in flashbacks that really didn’t pertain to the moments set in the present. The great “climax” if it could be described as one was a semi-judgmental confrontation that should have been a blow out rather than a fizzle. While a happy ending, the road getting there was far too jumbled and meandered far too much.