When Freya started her new job at Atypical, the hottest new tech company in Cali, it was a dream come true. She had worked her whole life to find her place, and she wasn’t going to let anything stop her from succeeding. But that was before she met Nicole, and before Nicole was murdered. Maybe success isn’t what Freya had always dreamt it would be, or it is just that Atypical isn’t? Freya must decide what it means to be successful, and how far she is willing to go to keep her new place in society, and most importantly what she is willing to sacrifice.
Isla is a crime journalist, and she can’t stand what the tabloid news is doing to Nicole’s reputation. A victim of assault herself, she knows that the media would like nothing better than to paint Nicole as a stupid girl who was asking for it. Isla can’t let the injustice stand and dedicates herself to finding out what really happened so that she can show the world that Nicole was a victim of vile cruelty, and more than that, a strong and intelligent woman.
Threads come together to weave a dark and corrupt web of lies hidden just below the surface. Is anyone ever truly safe? Can we really trust the people closest to us?
The Pact is an office crime drama, centred on the issues of bullying and assault, inspired by the #MeToo movement. It asks a lot of questions of its reader and raises a lot of different issues.
What happens when you finally get the chance you have been working towards your whole life, and you screw it all up in one moment of stupidity?
What do you do when your dream-come-true turns out to be a nightmare in the making?
Who can you turn to when people close to you break your trust? Your family, the police?
What is success?
What do you do when you can see injustice all around you, and no one else seems to care?
I don’t know that many of these questions are answered for Freya and Isla, but I appreciate that Heydenrych was ready to put those thoughts and conversations out there.
At first when I began reading The Pact, I had a hard time believing some of the social scenarios. The interactions which Freya has with Nicole and others in the office felt so unbelievably teenage, I felt like it was unrealistic. However, as I carried on, I came to realise that unfortunately the childish and immature tone may be all too truthful. So many people are full of pain and unrecognised fears and insecurities. As we grow up, we hope to become whole and many of us address the difficulties of youth and entering society, but many do not. It seems entirely realistic to think that given the correct set of circumstances and the opportunity, many people would revert directly back to the pettiness and confident venom of their youth, even long past their teens and twenties.
Isla was most certainly my favourite character in The Pact, and I found myself far more interested to see how her story would pan out than Freya’s. She is written as a realistically unhealthy woman, who overworks because she finds meaning in her job. I liked the way that she was apparently successful, and yet the nature of the journalism job she worked so hard to keep had soured over the years into something altogether different than what she had hoped it could be. Isla is the most true to life and relatable character, and I appreciated her story arc.
I enjoyed the basic story of this book, and there were a few twists that surprised me. Unfortunately I wouldn’t necessarily say that that was because of cleverness or plotting, but rather because they were so random and out of the blue that they felt as though the author herself had just sort of thought of them in the moment and popped them in. The plotting, in other words, was not tight or graceful. It felt like a lot of ideas and thoughts, woven together by chance to make a story at least a hundred pages longer than it ought to have been.
I also had a hard time believing Freya and her friends’ home life. Whenever the author described a morning when they were all together, or a dinner which they all contributed to, suddenly it was like reading a commercial for perfect peppy women, living in harmony in their sorority house. I get that this book is meant to be empowering of women, and showing them living together and contributing to a happy all-female household is a great idea. Only someone was always doing yoga while someone else was cooking and someone was counselling one of the others, and there was always a lot of wine being splashed around, and a lot of “you go girl, you’re better than that man” talk, and all of these things come together to equal an over the top, cartoonish diorama of the blissful chaos of co-habiting with young and hip women.
Overall, I would say that whilst I had issues with the structure and believability of this book, The Pact is an enjoyable and quick read if you are looking for something young, snappy and challenging of negative social norms. There are some loveable characters and some sweet moments, as well as some very painful and challenging scenes, which effectively highlight some of the things that have gone so wrong in our modern culture.
Isla is a crime journalist, and she can’t stand what the tabloid news is doing to Nicole’s reputation. A victim of assault herself, she knows that the media would like nothing better than to paint Nicole as a stupid girl who was asking for it. Isla can’t let the injustice stand and dedicates herself to finding out what really happened so that she can show the world that Nicole was a victim of vile cruelty, and more than that, a strong and intelligent woman.
Threads come together to weave a dark and corrupt web of lies hidden just below the surface. Is anyone ever truly safe? Can we really trust the people closest to us?
The Pact is an office crime drama, centred on the issues of bullying and assault, inspired by the #MeToo movement. It asks a lot of questions of its reader and raises a lot of different issues.
What happens when you finally get the chance you have been working towards your whole life, and you screw it all up in one moment of stupidity?
What do you do when your dream-come-true turns out to be a nightmare in the making?
Who can you turn to when people close to you break your trust? Your family, the police?
What is success?
What do you do when you can see injustice all around you, and no one else seems to care?
I don’t know that many of these questions are answered for Freya and Isla, but I appreciate that Heydenrych was ready to put those thoughts and conversations out there.
At first when I began reading The Pact, I had a hard time believing some of the social scenarios. The interactions which Freya has with Nicole and others in the office felt so unbelievably teenage, I felt like it was unrealistic. However, as I carried on, I came to realise that unfortunately the childish and immature tone may be all too truthful. So many people are full of pain and unrecognised fears and insecurities. As we grow up, we hope to become whole and many of us address the difficulties of youth and entering society, but many do not. It seems entirely realistic to think that given the correct set of circumstances and the opportunity, many people would revert directly back to the pettiness and confident venom of their youth, even long past their teens and twenties.
Isla was most certainly my favourite character in The Pact, and I found myself far more interested to see how her story would pan out than Freya’s. She is written as a realistically unhealthy woman, who overworks because she finds meaning in her job. I liked the way that she was apparently successful, and yet the nature of the journalism job she worked so hard to keep had soured over the years into something altogether different than what she had hoped it could be. Isla is the most true to life and relatable character, and I appreciated her story arc.
I enjoyed the basic story of this book, and there were a few twists that surprised me. Unfortunately I wouldn’t necessarily say that that was because of cleverness or plotting, but rather because they were so random and out of the blue that they felt as though the author herself had just sort of thought of them in the moment and popped them in. The plotting, in other words, was not tight or graceful. It felt like a lot of ideas and thoughts, woven together by chance to make a story at least a hundred pages longer than it ought to have been.
I also had a hard time believing Freya and her friends’ home life. Whenever the author described a morning when they were all together, or a dinner which they all contributed to, suddenly it was like reading a commercial for perfect peppy women, living in harmony in their sorority house. I get that this book is meant to be empowering of women, and showing them living together and contributing to a happy all-female household is a great idea. Only someone was always doing yoga while someone else was cooking and someone was counselling one of the others, and there was always a lot of wine being splashed around, and a lot of “you go girl, you’re better than that man” talk, and all of these things come together to equal an over the top, cartoonish diorama of the blissful chaos of co-habiting with young and hip women.
Overall, I would say that whilst I had issues with the structure and believability of this book, The Pact is an enjoyable and quick read if you are looking for something young, snappy and challenging of negative social norms. There are some loveable characters and some sweet moments, as well as some very painful and challenging scenes, which effectively highlight some of the things that have gone so wrong in our modern culture.