I Thought You Said This Would Work by Ann Garvin - 3⭐

When we first enter Ann Garvin’s I Thought You Said This Would Work, Samantha Arias’ best friend, Katie, is at the hospital getting blood work done, and it’s not looking good. Without missing a beat, Samantha runs to her friend’s side, but when she arrives there she has a most unpleasant surprise: her ex-best friend, Holly Dunfee, is already there. In spite of the gravity of Katie’s situation, Samantha can’t help but wonder whom she called first. After all, she was the one who was at her side tending to her every need the first time Katie was diagnosed with cancer. Holly, though a hard-ass lawyer, loses her edge when encountered with needles, tubes, heart monitors, blood, and most hospital situations in general.

Which friend Katie called first becomes the least of Samantha’s problems when Katie makes one impossible request of her two friends. The last time she battled cancer she had her faithful dog, Peanut, at her side — a senior Great Pyrenees rescue, who suffers from diabetes and severe anxiety. This time, he’s not at her side after her cheating ex-husband, Tom, took him and their camper in the divorce. Katie insists that she cannot go through the process again without Peanut and begs Samantha and Holly to travel from Wisconsin to California to bring him back.

Holly and Samantha are reluctant. They haven’t been in each other’s presence in nearly 15 years, since Holly left without goodbyes or explanations the morning after their college graduation, then never kept in touch. But Peanut’s anxiety would never allow him to travel in any mode of transportation other than the camper, so the two ex-friends would be forced to spend several days in very close proximity driving back from California. However, they’re both eager to prove their loyalty to Katie in her time of need. So Holly, the high-strung, control freak, and Samantha, the pushover with hypersomnia that’s triggered by stress, hop aboard a plane to retrieve Peanut and the camper.

As if the idea of going on a road trip with someone they’ve both written off wasn’t enough to test Holly and Samantha, madness ensues when Summer Silva, a washed-up, ex-TV star who now hosts a YouTube show, latches on to them and their “purpose” after sitting next to Samantha on the flight to California, Samantha revealing her whole life to her while talking in her sleep. A flaky, impulsive, modern hippie, Summer marches to the beat of her own drum, insisting that their journey isn’t over, often complicating already complicated situations — she steals the camper from Tom’s wife right under her nose — then finding clever ways to get them out of the messes she’s made.

Even though one of the main arcs of the narrative follows Katie’s disease, I Thought You Said This Would Work is a light read that centers on the theme of healing, not just in a physical sense. Though Holly and Samantha go on their road trip to bring back that which will hopefully help Katie heal, they both go through their own healing process themselves, as spending time with each other’s clashing personalities forces them to do — Samantha must learn to assert herself while Holly needs to lighten up. In the process, their relationship with each other also goes through a transformation as they learn more about themselves, each other, and the past miscommunications that ended their friendship.

Garvin handles the topics, human at their core, with the utmost tact, presenting a story of loss and trauma, revealing the ways in which everyone we meet is dealing with some form of past hurt, pulling apart the veils of the stereotypes and superficialities that we hang over people when we refuse to take the time to understand why they react the way they do.

This is cleverly represented in Samantha’s flight response when she chooses silence, her hypersomnia taking the reigns of stressful situations, versus Holly’s dominant fight response, her willingness to pounce and attack anything that seems even slightly confrontational. At every moment, in spite of Holly’s cutthroat personality, we see Samantha’s wishes to understand Holly’s hostility toward her — unsure, after all these years, of what she did to push her away, wondering why her once dear friend turned so stone cold. We are also given insight, through Samantha’s first-person narration, into the conditioning that shaped her submissiveness. Garvin’s fast-paced but perceptive narrative reveals the hurt that people carry, and the ways these manifest themselves, not just in our bodies but in the ways it filters through in our everyday actions.