Jessica Woodbury's Reviews > Fiona and Jane

Great novel in stories on two friends following several arcs across decades.

This doesn't quite follow a traditional structure. Sometimes we stop moving forward in time. Sometimes we shift away from the titular characters' point of view. But this really works with the narrative, which feels alive and spontaneous.

While their friendship is the center, they get to have very separate arcs that sometimes cause friction. Jane deals with lingering guilt over the death of her father and is tied to her family in a way Fiona is not. Fiona is hyper-aware of class, feeling a need to achieve and succeed even when she doesn't really want to because of her modest upbringing. As they get older, romantic partnerships become more of a wedge between them. And yet this isn't a book where they fight in big dramatic scenes. Mostly these things just pass without either acknowledging their issues directly to the other, just as so many friendships leave their biggest conflicts unsaid. It lets each of them really come through individually even as their friendship remains a uniting thread.

I would have been happy if this had been twice as long. I felt like I was really just getting to dive into these characters deeply and I wanted to know what would happen to them next.

I also appreciated Jane as a character who, if I recall correctly, never really pins down her sexual identity. She definitely identifies as queer and friends refer to her as a lesbian though she sleeps with men and women, and sometimes seems to lean more towards one or the other.