There are many kinds of stories about “the one that got away” and the most poignant, to me, are the tales of deep soulful childhood friendships that got weird and distanced without the author really understanding why. This is a story of an adult woman mostly told in flashbacks of her being a teenager with her best girl friend -- a bit brasher, a bit bolder -- and the things they do for eachother. The narrator also briefly comes back to the present to relate her semi-satisfying relationship with her husband which definitely runs neither as hot nor as cold as her teenaged friendship. The book was good, interesting and compelling but it was very similar to one of the Connie Willis short stories I’d recently read and paled somewhat by comparison.