Review: Poignant Combined Stories
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 3, 2014
27 (Twenty-Seven): Six Friends, One Year by R. J. Heald is a contemporary novel that follows a year in the intertwined lives of six college friends.Dave, Katie, Renée, Sam, Steve, and James were chums at the university. After graduation, the inevitable drifting apart happens. Renée is entangled in a troubled marriage, and reaches out to her old college friends and suggests a reunion. Facebook shows her chums busy with exciting lives filled with world travels, successful careers, and fulfilling relationships. To her surprise, the group agrees to come together for a reunion.Her friends’ lives are not as idyllic as first thought. They struggle with unemployment, inappropriate relationships, and destructive addictions. Some are still finding their way in life, and these lost souls are the most poignant of their combined stories.Despite having six storylines, Heald’s story presents interesting players. One is a travelling teacher who seeks to settle down, while another wanders in his career. A third copes with a loveless marriage, while a fourth seeks a marriage at any cost. The fifth of these friends finds an inappropriate soul mate, while the last sad case has lost his soul.27 is a complex story told with a deft hand. Some of the six characters were likable, others were not, but all were written with distinctive voices. Choices and their consequences played well in the mixed storylines.This very good story could be made even better by reducing the complexity—perhaps remove a storyline and expand the remaining characters to keep the same overall length. Or the story could keep the six interesting characters and be lengthened to tell us more detail about these fascinating, and oh so human, college pals.