I liked the premise of 'Stargazer' more than the execution. I read it along with my book club and the reactions were very mixed. I felt it was slow to get started and I found the different timelines confusing in places. Having said that, Laurie Petrou writes well and the book takes a close look at toxic friendships and the nature of privilege. Petrou also captures the beautiful agony of young love effectively.

A dark and twisted tale that I devoured in one sitting, desperate to find out what happened. Its difficult to say too much without giving the plot away, but it's one of those thrillers that I can see making its way to the screen.. The characters, not all of them likeable, were brilliantly crafted and there are so many 'nooooooooo' moments throughout the story due to unexpected twists. When you cry for a character you know the author has done well Oh, and the references to 90s music were nostalgic too.. I loved it!

This novel has gotten under my skin. I absolutely adored it.

It’s about two young women - Diana and Aurelle - who lived together throughout their childhood but only became friends the year before going off to college. Both girls are wealthy, but from different backgrounds. Diane’s family life is distant and shrouded in recent tragedy, whereas Aurelle’s family are large and loving. Aurelle’s mother is a famous artist and fashion designer. The girls’ friendship becomes intense and all-encompassing and they decide to go to college together. Then their lives begin to unravel in different ways…

I fell completely head over heels with this novel. The descriptions of the settings, especially the cabin and the lake, were intoxicating, and the girls themselves were both relatable in their own ways. This book was just so beautifully written that I’m not sure I can do it justice in my review. I also don’t want to say any more about the plot because I don’t want to include spoilers but I found it moved in surprising ways. By the end I was dumbstruck.

Honestly this is a real contender for one of my favourite reads of 2022. Stunning.

I couldn't put this book down. It was such a gripping, poignant read. I really liked the author's writing style, it felt understated and everything, all the emotions, just sort of creep onto you? I don't know if I'm making sense but as I was reading to the ending, I had those kinds of emotions. Like I knew something was going to go wrong and there were a dozen ways it could and I was getting scared but I couldn't stop reading.

Both main characters, Diana and Aurelle, were extremely sympathetic to me. Diana especially, I really liked. She's not likeable at all but somehow you understand why she's become who she is. Aurelle as well, I felt really bad for her. Watching how their relationship went on a downward slope was heartbreaking.

I've already said that the author has great writing, but I just want to point out how she gave such vivid descriptions about the college Diana and Aurelle go to, the lake, the art, the way it was all summer camp style, I really loved it. It felt realistic and nostalgic and actually made me wish it was real so I could go visit.

Finishing it left me with a hollow feeling inside my chest. I started this book with already high expectations and it really did reach all the high marks.

Diana always admired the family next door, the mum (Marianne Taylor) is a famous fashion designer and her family just seem so nice compared to her own. Her hateful sadistic older brother spends his time bullying her and loves nothing more than showing her up in front of his friends.
When tragedy strikes for Diana's family, Marianne encourages her daughter Aurelle to befriend Diana and they soon forge a very strong bond to each other, more than just friends, they are lovers and soulmates.
This book is so descriptive, of places sights sound and emotions that you feel like you are there in the moment with them. It's set in 1995 which is relatable to me because I was a similar age to them at that time. It is utterly unputdownable!
Throughout the book there is an undertone that something is going to happen and the further you get into the book the more chilling and haunting it becomes!

An intriguing view of jealousy and toxic friendships. I’m not sure any of the characters portrayed are particularly likeable. The young girls start off their journey together in harmony but gradually drift apart as Diana’s focus becomes more intense and Aurelle stars to fade. It felt like there was a constant threat hanging over the relationship- an imbalance that threatened to topple it with just the slightest nudge.

I found this an extremely atmospheric book with dreamy, dark writing and complicated contemporary characters that were a dirty breath of air compared to flat, dull cookie-cutter in the books with similar decaying veins that don’t pulse nearly as hard or brutal enough.
I did feel it sort of lost the hard, pounding pulse in the middle and I started to feel distant and less interested, but I really liked the slow, surreal pace because it worked well with the strange, flaws characters, I don’t mind a slow book and I think the slowness really worked well for this because scenes weren’t rushed through or glossed over, it really went into depth for how characters were thinking or what they were doing.
I felt the ending chapters leading up to this gnawing event were very raw and alive, and the best sections of this book in my opinion.
I could see those terrible, tragic scenes playing out in front of me and I thought the dialogue was natural, simple, and realistic-the characters spoke in everyday causality, not spouting long bursts of frothy poetry or endless, tiring clogs of mysterious monologues and bizarre surrealism.
There were small snippets of poetic speaking but it worked fine because most of the conversations were simple and organic, especially near the end as I mentioned when the police have to get involved it was an everyday, natural line of few sentences that would’ve happened in life for a terrifying event like this.
I felt the two central women were realistically flawed and complicated, I didn’t think anything that happened was predictable but I do feel some of the way it turned out has been done before so it did feel a little tired at times-but I guess that is a part of it, in a strange toxic so-called friendship certain things do play out similar to how they have before because that’s how these kind of suffocating emotions work-that’s how we notice, or how we miss, certain signs in a person that you either realise or you try to disbelieve is an abusive, very complicated friend who runs so much deeper and darker than you either thought. So yes, some of the way the characters were developed were a little re-used but that is because that’s how it works most of the time-we have lists of toxic signs in a friend because toxic people tend to use the same gestures, mind games, and overall soil, and if they’ve been noticed and documented that many times in studies of different toxic friends then even though some of the way the characters are developed might feel a little stale or familiar it does work because that’s how it goes-like in abusive men they all have their own ways of being abusive but they all do still have similar tactics and movements and words they do that means we can recognise common abusive signs even if each abuser is still very different.
Overall an engaging, tense, and powerful read that I will go back to and I feel those last chapters were so well written and so vivid and real.

I really wanted to love this novel, but I just couldn't get into it.

So sadly, it's a DNF from me.

I enjoyed it, and gave it 4 stars in the end. The book moves between the point of view of Diana and Marianne. I liked them both, but equally disliked them too. You’ll get why when you read it. The friendship was so toxic, yet beautiful, and tragic all at once. Their closeness was something else, they do everything together, and it all started kind of by chance. The things they go through, tell each other, and help each other with is the stuff all friendships should be made of. But the underlying jealousy and nastiness creeps its way through, and the story ends so far from where you’d first imagine.

This was a bit of a slow burn for me, but I did end up loving it.
I liked both the main characters, Diana and Aurelle although Marianne annoyed me and enjoyed the growing tension in the book with Diana's obsession with the Taylor family and her ambition as an artist. With Aurelle loosing her way to drugs and the death at the Lake, the plot pulls you towards a compelling ending

I wanted to like this book but I didn’t. It does read in a fairly dreamlike way (think virgin suicides) but I found the first 2/3 a bit dull and nothing really happened. The book is well written and the exploration of the characters towards the end was good but it took a long time to get there. The conclusion of the story felt a little obvious from about 10% in.
I do think this is a bad book, and is certainly not badly written: just not one for me.
Read through netgalley for an honest review

Unfortunately I haven't been able to get into this book after trying a few times so have chosen to DNF at this point.

This is a gripping novel based on the intense, young friendship of two girls who come together after the death of Diana's brother and have stayed together ever since. At first the pair look like a match brought together by fate who really bring out the best of them both but as Diana starts to focus more on her art at the expense of her muse, things change for the worse. There is a dark edge throughout the novel which comes out towards the last third and makes sure you don't want to put it down until the very end. Overall an intense and dark story with a twist.

I found this story to be quite slow to get going. I was intrigued to see how Diana and Aurelle's strange friendship would play out but it didn't grip me as much as I thought it would. The main problem for me was I couldn't relate to either of the characters and I didn't particularly like them. Diana certainly had her issues and it was clear from the start that there was a dark side to her, this was the most interesting part of the story. Aurelle just seemed confused the whole time and followed Diana or took drugs. I had figured out quite early what was going to happen towards the end and whilst it was a dramatic and dark ending I did feel disappointed that I didn't enjoy it as much as I had hoped.

I only finished this book for our book club. If I was reading this one on my own I would have probably given up on it.

The writing style wasn’t something I managed to get on with.

However that being said I did find the beginning of the book fairly engaging. The younger relationships had me a little more invested.

As the book moved on it became more unbelievable and unnecessary (in my opinion)

The biggest factor for me was that I’m not entirely convinced that I know what happened? As in, what the plot really was?!

The Great Gatsby meets The Secret History: an ominous and compelling tale of love, grief, obsession, privilege, envy and celebrity. Laurie Petrou’s characters could so easily become caricatures, but are drawn so finely as to keep them just on the right side of believable. This book is going to haunt me.

Stargazer’ by Laurie Petrou is a story of two girls - Aurelle Taylor and Diana Martin. Neighbours who paid little attention to one another until one day following tragedy they become best friends, inseparable and so begins a tale of love, obsession, heatbreak and loneliness as Diana chases stardom whilst Aurelle loses herself in the shadow of her friend and her family legacy.

The narrative takes a bit of getting use to as it flickers between past and ‘present’, this eventually serves the book well as we begin to understand the motives and personalities of the characters.

The pacing remains bizarre throughout and at moments I felt as if I was waiting for something to happen. If you seek a book with twists and turns this isn't for you, it is a slow burn (in my opinion) but pays off at the end.

Nevertheless an enjoyable book, 4.5 stars.

Thank you Netgalley and publishers for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Wow - quite the rollercoaster! Not having read any of Petrou's work before, I was unsure if I was going to enjoy it. But what a thrill ride - the dual narrative took a while to get used to, but once in is a very pacey, thrilling and raw book about interestingly flawed young women navigating their place in the world, and what risks you'd take to be part of another's life. I was really glad it was set in the 1990s as that rich mine of culture and pre-internet exposure allows for a deep dive into the recklessness of that decade and its defining moments in art, coming of age anarchy and freedom. Very clever twists and turns between Diana and Aurelle, which pose the idea of risk it takes to keep the muse and the psychology of control over again. Very enjoyable!

Heady and evocative, Stargazer retraces the mutually obsessive relationship between to young women -- spanning years from their adolescence to the tantalising first steps into adulthood.

Ambitious Diana Martin has spent her life enduring the abuse from her older brother, watching the family next door - the Taylors - with combination of shiny-eyed admiration and burning envy: star fashion designer Marianne Taylor, beautiful and charming, and Aurelle, her adored but shy and directionless teen daughter, of the same age as Diana.

In the wake of a terrible tragedy, their lives finally intertwine. Diane and Aurelle's bond turns to be sweetly vicious, gripping the reader just as tight as it grips them, fuelling the impending sense of doom that only grows stronger by the page and triggering a sequence of events that, in hindsight, could have led nowhere else.

After all, what can come out of a relationship where love and obsession and envy burn just as bright if not charred ground?

Stargazer is firmly nestled the 1990s; the hedonistic atmospheres, the music, the makeup, the drugs, the salacious freedom of a remote, elite university. This novel is a dive into the seemingly placid depths of a lake that hides turbulent and dangerous currents. Weeks after turning its last page, I still feel the lure of it, and I'm sure so will you.

Many thanks to Laurie Petrou, the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC.

Thank you Netgalley and publisher for the arc!

In Stargazer, we follow Diana and Aurelle through their late teenage years exploring those coming of age feelings and navigating their intense friendship. It's a haunting, gripping and an honest read!

This has become my favourite read of the year so far, I could not put this one down. The characters felt so realistic with Laurie Petrou beautifully writing from differing characters perspectives, it was fascinating to see how they reacted to the same events and the effects on their very codependent friendship.

I also adored the setting of this book. The story diverges between timelines leading up to Diana and Aurelle attending a remote camp-style college which gave me all the 90's vibes!

5/5*, a phenomenal book!