The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Sally Warner's Some Friend . This guide is designed to enrich your experience of this novel of friendship and trust, betrayal and secrecy. But everyone around him does.
Some Friend opens with a new answering machine.
Throughout the work, the answering machine's messages are played before each chapter. These messages allow the author to tell her story through a series of clues. The novel raises interesting questions about the boundaries between family and friends, about where responsibility rests, and about loyalty to oneself and others. First, Ned's grandmother, with whom he lives, goes into the hospital, and the hunt is on for his mother, who is somewhere in Texas, involved in a bad scene. When the police and the social work system become players, Ned's position becomes a tricky one.