She's your best friend, She knows all your secrets

Kaleigh Walsh

A Simple Favor

By, Darcey Bell

“My mother used to say: Everyone has secrets. That’s why you can never really know anyone else. Or trust anyone. It’s why you can never know yourself. Sometimes we even keep secrets from ourselves...And I wonder if she was not just preparing me but programming me for secrecy and mistrust. Did she sense that I would grow up to have darker and more shameful secrets than anyone else’s? Secrets I mostly manage to keep- even from myself?”(1).

A Simple Favor by Darcey Bell is one of the best books I have read. It pulls you in from reading the first page and keeps you pulled in until you read the last page. There’s mystery, romance, drama and it all blends together to give you an amazing read. It starts when Emily and Stephanie meet picking up their sons from school. Nicky( Emily’s son) and Miles ( Stephanie’s son) are best friends and ask to have a playdate. The moms agree and hang out while their sons are playing together. They start hanging out more as their sons have playdates a lot. They are becoming close friends. One day, Emily is at work and asks for a “simple favor.” She says she is staying at work late and needs someone to take care of Nicky while her husband is away for a work trip. Later in the night Emily still hasn’t come back and Stephanie is worried as she has never left Nicky this long. She waits until morning and gets the boys off to school and when Emily still hasn’t returned that day Stephanie is really worried and she calls Emily's husband Sean. Sean doesn’t seem too worried but does end up coming back to take care of Nicky. Sean and Stephanie take care of the two boys during the weeks Emily is missing they start to become a “family.” The police are starting to discover Emily’s disappearance as a suicide: she was found at her family’s lake house dead after drinking and using pills; they say there were no signs of struggling, so it wasn’t a murder, and there was a possibility she was drinking and taking pills and decided to go for a swim.  They were able to identify Emily from her engagement ring, DNA and a very specific tattoo she got in her early twenties. What no one knew about Emily was that she had an identical twin sister that she had kept a secret from her friends and husband. She and her sister were very close but her sister had a dark history with drugs and alcohol. Evelyn, Emily’s sister, called Emily a few days prior to Emily’s disappearance saying she was going to commit suicide at their families lake house. In hopes to try and stop Evelyn, Emily drives up to the lake house to help Evelyn. In doing this she decides to make a little “game:” “our plan is working… it could still work… we’ll get the money before too long” (224-225) How good of a “friend” was Stephanie to her? Stephanie tries to look for her and tries not to lose faith in Emily and tries to believe she is actually alive. Once Emily starts getting “bored” with the “game” she starts making it interesting again. She starts appearing at Nicky’s school and talking to him at recess. She shows up to her old house which Miles and Stephanie are now living in. She calls Stephanie and confronts her about her past with her half brother “ Spying on Stephanie in my house is like playing with some weird 3-d live-action dollhouse,”(139) Sean doesn’t believe Nicky and Stephanie and thinks they are seeing things when they really aren’t.

I will leave the summary there so I don’t spoil the big ending but this book was one of the most interesting books I have read. I would recommend this book for anyone who loves: mystery, drama, romance, a little bit of disturbance and suspense. It was full of all these things and there were times I would get to a really big part, think I figured out what happened and then the complete opposite parts of my theories would happen. You never knew what was going to come next, you never knew about some things and they would come out of nowhere but make so much sense. I would 10/10 recommend this book because you never knew what was happening, it was very straightforward without being straight forward, it flowed, it was interesting and just an overall great book. Some things that happened in this book really made you question people’s morals in life and  really made you ask the question of “ why would a person do this and what was going through their head.” That is why I would give this book a 10/10 and I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for suspense, mystery, drama, and romance in a book.