She's got a scheme, and it's The Friend Scheme

 

So, I’ve read one other book from Cale Dietrich, The Love Interest, and I’ve followed him for I don’t know how long, so I’ve been waiting for The Friend Scheme for a good long while, and I’m so happy I got it.

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In what is apparently tradition for this blog, Miss Blurb says that seventeen-year-old Matt is the son of one of the most powerful criminals in the world. Then his desire to get out of the world of crime grows as he meets Jason. But then Matt becomes suspicious of Jason’s intentions as he seems a little too perfect, especially when he keeps encouraging Matt the disclose details about his father’s empire. Reading this, this did make me think that perhaps Jason was some kind of a plant from the opposing crime family, trying to take Matt’s father down, that’s what I immediately thought.

Right on the first page, Matt literally says, “I never wanted to be a criminal”, so they’re off to a great start, and then we’re introduced to the fact that there’s basically a turf war, or a gang war going on between these two families, the Millers and the Donovans – it does get explained why the families are warring. From memory, it was that the families were working together in the illegal alcohol trade, then one of them wanted to get into drugs, but the other didn’t.

We’re introduced to Jason in the first chapter as well. Matt has come back to one of his family’s bars after firebombing one of the Donovan’s places. They meet in a bathroom (scream), which is great for the gay rumours that are surrounding Matt. And then when they’re talking, they conveniently like almost all the same things, and really didn’t help me thinking that he was a plant. And at one point, he comes over to Matt’s house when his dad and brother are out, and he’s complimenting basically everything. They also have this, “don’t talk about family”, thing between them. But Jason was laying it on thick with the conveniently liking everything – like when Matt asks him what music he likes, Jason just says he listens to whatever is on the playlists Spotify makes for him. Now let me say, mama, that is garbage, right there. Like fair enough listening to your Discovery Weekly and Release Radar, but at I’ll add at least one song or album to my library, maybe every other week from my Discover Weekly, so I didn’t believe that Jason was really Like That. So, for a while I was kind of waiting for the drop, for Jason to, for lack of better phrasing, come out, but come out in the sense of, clearly, he hasn’t just randomly bumped into Matt in the bathroom at a bar. And then, about 100 pages in, I had to stop and was like, “Oh, neither of them telling the other their last names... They’re going to be from rival families, aren’t they?” and then I kind of assumed it was going to end up turning into almost a Romeo & Juliet kind of thing. Rival families, so even if they wanted to be, they couldn’t be together.

But to return back to Matt being the flop of the family, even when he said straight up that he didn’t want to be a criminal, I was half expecting to see more crime in the book – thinking that his family would be like, “Well, he’s the weak link, let’s toughen him up”. There are bits of that, but it’s nowhere near as present as I thought it would be, and I’m actually kind of glad for that, because it meant we got to see more of Matt, and how he, even though he says he doesn’t want to be a criminal, really hates the world he’s and he’s coping with the fact he’s living a life he doesn’t want to.

I’m not going to spoil as to whether Jason is a Donovan, and now I’ve written that out… That would make Jason, the character, Jason Donovan, like the Australian actor. Why he of all people is what has come to me now that I’m writing this, I don’t know. But I’m not going to spoil it, like I just said, because this book is so recent (in the UK at least – I’m very confused about the release schedule of this book) I don’t want to ruin in for any potential readers. And now, this is really annoying for me, because there are parts that I do want to write about, but since I don’t want to spoil it, I’ve just had to cut chunks off this post because they’ll spoil too much. All I’ll say is that I wasn’t expecting the story to end in the way that it did, but since it did end the way that it did, I was happy. This was definitely one of those books that, and this might be an odd analogy, shoots you out of a cannon in the beginning, and then ramps itself back up to shoot you out of a second cannon later in the book.

And finally, since I couldn’t think of any other smart way of working this little bit into the post, I’ll just tack in on at the end. This book had a lot of short, paragraphs. And I was so happy to see that, just because I’ve noticed that I write like that as well. It was validating to see, because I remember one of my teachers in university questioning why everything I wrote had such short paragraphs, and I didn’t know how to say, “Bestie, it’s YA, it’s just like that.” But to see something published that has been written, basically, in the same way that I write was so validating.

    Okay, bye!