Ten years ago, after a sun-soaked summer spent in Greece, best friends Bess and Joni were cleared of having any involvement in their friend Evangeline’s death. But that didn’t stop the media from ripping apart their teenage lives like vultures.
While the girls were never convicted, Joni, ever the opportunist, capitalized on her newfound infamy to become a motivational speaker. Bess, on the other hand, resolved to make her life as small and controlled as possible so she wouldn’t risk losing everything all over again. And it almost worked. . . .
Except now Joni is tangled up in a crime eerily similar to that one fateful night in Greece. And when she asks Bess to come back to LA to support her, Bess has a decision to make.
Is it finally time to face up to what happened that night, exposing herself as the young woman she once was and maybe still is? And what if she doesn’t like what she finds?
Release Date: Apr 4, 2023
Publisher: Penguin Group
Imprint: Berkley
Price: $14.99
Bess Winter leads a fairly solitary life, living away from her family and friends and working from home as a moderator for a dating site. Her quiet life is upended when she receives an unexpected visit from a former friend she hasn’t seen in ten years. Joni Le Bon is now a successful motivational speaker and self-help guru and has come to ask Bess a favor. Seeing Joni again brings back painful memories for Bess of the trip to Greece she, Joni, and their friend Evangeline took almost a decade before. The trip ended in tragedy, and although their lives went in completely different directions, neither Bess nor Joni was ever the same again.
Before We Were Innocent is an entertaining, literary suspense novel told in two different timelines, all from Bess’s point-of-view. Who each woman is and was in the past is key to the novel. I enjoyed getting to know Bess and both her positive and negative qualities. I never quite got a handle on Bess’s relationship with her family, but I liked her brother and his fiancée. Joni was harder to read, and I never felt like I was seeing the real Joni. This was part of her character, though, since she was all about appearances for her online fans and followers. Sometimes I felt like Joni was trying to be a good friend to Bess, and other times I felt she was lying to protect herself at Bess’s expense. When the timeline switches to the past, we also get to know Evangeline, who was the victim of a tragic event in Greece. Although she had the reputation of being sweet and impressionable, I found her to be manipulative and not always sympathetic. She loved her brother, Theo, but I feel she took advantage of his instinct to keep her happy.
Much of the book shows how people can be judged based on outward appearances and hearsay by people who don’t know them or the situations they’re in. Bess reacts to the unwanted attention and judgment by trying to hide from the world, but Joni lives her life boldly, refusing to be defined by her past or what other people think. Ironically, each woman judges the others for the way she’s chosen to live her life after the death of their friend in Greece. I was very engaged in the story even when I didn’t care for the choices the main characters made. There is a lot of drama and some ambiguity in this entertaining novel, but for the most part, I liked how everything wrapped up at the end.
~ Christine
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