The Other's Gold

"Wow," Margaret said again when they'd finished piling their trays and stood, looking for a place to sit. "Just . . . wow!" She held her tray with one arm and used the other to gesture around the room, as though her suitemates couldn't see it. Her attitude was infectious. Ji Sun, the least impressed by institutional spaces, especially American ones that prided themselves on their "heritage," did feel now like the room was polished gold, sun dust from the fading day washing the students in honeyed light, glinty little sparks bouncing off the lowest glass facets in the light fixtures.

"Yeah, hey, wow," Ji Sun said, teasing but warm. They settled at a round six-top that they could tell in their bones would be their table, even as they shared it on this first night with two other freshmen, both of whom seemed more in awe of this foursome, somehow already solidified, than of their surroundings.

They traded the usual questions with the two other girls, Where are you from? Which is your residence hall? but none of the four bothered to listen to or remember the other girls' answers, especially after, when Lainey answered upstate New York, they asked again with new emphasis, No, but, where are you from from, like where are you originally from? Lainey rolled her eyes, a signal to her roommates to let Lainey decide when or whether to answer this question, which Alice and Ji Sun might have guessed, but Margaret wouldn't have known. The four had some basic background about one another, and now wanted urgently to know more vital information. Did they have boyfriends? Girlfriends? Had they ever? Had they had sex? Who was smartest? Who would be best loved by the others among them? Who would lead the way?

Four was good in this regard, they could see it already, better than three because there was less stasis. Three meant one could always think of herself as the nucleus, the reason, but four were enough to make a bridge, to link arms all sorts of ways, to have no center.

After dinner, they stopped outside the closed door to their room, the new whiteboard hung there, pristine when they'd left,

mistake.
Entertainment Weekly

[The Other s Gold is] an ode to the turmoil and joy of female friendship, and the perfect book to read with your friends.
Bustle

The Other s Gold is as beautifully written and epic in scope as A Little Life, but featuring women characters.
Refinery29

In this wonderful book about the complexities of female friendship, we meet Lainey, Ji Sun, Alice, and Margaret as they begin college. . . . By the end of the book, you ll feel like this is your own group of friends and you ll be just as emotionally invested.
Mindbodygreen
 
The Other s Gold is a beautiful, relatable, and bittersweet read that examines the strength of female friendships as they evolve.
Hello Giggles

This book is unexpectedly charming in its portrayal of four women who meet in college and hold on tightly to their friendship through adulthood. The structure is whip-smart: The book is told chronologically, but split into four parts, one for each woman's greatest mistake. And the characters grow increasingly three-dimensional sometimes in shocking ways with every chapter.
Marie Claire

Elizabeth Ames s debut explores the changing bonds of four college friends as the mistakes they make later in life threaten to either deteriorate or strengthen their relationship.
InStyle

Four friends meet their freshman year of college, as so many of us do. But as they grow up and become parents, mistakes they make and circumstances that would tear apart their friendship begin to have serious consequences. Told in a series of four sections, this book feels both familiar and wonderfully unique.
Good Housekeeping

Four young women are assigned to the same suite at Quincy-Hawthorn College, forming fierce friendships that will follow them well into adulthood.
New York Post

Exploring the sensual, visceral and horror-filled experiences of being female while never abandoning the love Ames has for her characters, The Other's Gold is smart and provocative, satisfying and unforgettable.
Shelf Awareness (starred review)

A character-driven drama at its finest, each woman presents an engaging voice that you can't help but get invested in. The mistake each of them makes gets its own section, and honestly, until you learn everything that happened, it's hard to put this book down. If you're looking for an escape from your sweltering office job, or just need something that'll really spark conversation at your book club, grab yourself a copy this August!
Get Literary

A sharply-drawn portrait of a lifelong friendship, The Other s Gold follows four young women bearing past traumas and navigating unimagined futures. With an uncanny eye for detail, Elizabeth Ames charts the complex, ever-shifting topography of this chosen family and illuminates the ways our closest friends sustain us over the course of our lives.
Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere

Reading Elizabeth Ames s The Other s Gold is like sinking into a lucid dream, wonderful and unsettling in turns, surreally beautiful throughout. As we follow four friends through university and beyond, into the messy miasma of life, we feel as if we are growing into adulthood, into womanhood, with her characters. We feel every bruise, every elation, in part because Ames writes in language that is feverish and refined, with equal parts tenderness and ruthlessness. That her writing can do all this at once is incredible. Read her, and you will be richer for it.
  Jesmyn Ward, New York Times bestselling author of Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones

One of the most immersive, unsettling books I've read in a long, long time. For hours after I finished it, the book felt realer to me than my own life did. There is something almost painful about how close we get to these characters: Ames observes them with a kind of ardent incision that at times feels like watching someone perform open-heart surgery, and at other times feels like having open-heart surgery performed on you. I was devastated by it. I loved it.  
Kristen Roupenian, bestselling author of You Know You Want This

As first-year students at the prestigious Quincy-Hawthorn College, four suitemates are thrown together and enter into an intensely close friendship. . . . Written in a deft omniscient narration . . . the novel sharpens when the women come into independent adulthood, and though the structure emphasizes the sameness of their transgressions the way all of us will cross lines for morally complicated reasons the characters finally bloom into vibrant individuality.
Kirkus