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Book Review: Good Girls Don’t Die by Christina Henry
Three different women find themselves living out scenarios that seem weirdly like the plots of popular books – only real people start being murdered.
Summary:
Celia wakes up in a house that’s supposed to be hers. There’s a little girl who claims to be her daughter and a man who claims to be her husband, but Celia knows this family—and this life—is not hers…
Allie is supposed to be on a fun weekend trip—but then her friend’s boyfriend unexpectedly invites the group to a remote cabin in the woods. No one else believes Allie, but she is sure that something about this trip is very, very wrong…
Maggie just wants to be home with her daughter, but she’s in a dangerous situation and she doesn’t know who put her there or why. She’ll have to fight with everything she has to survive…
Three women. Three stories. Only one way out. This captivating novel will keep readers guessing until the very end.
Review:
I loved the idea for this book. Waking up and finding yourself living in the plot of your favorite type of story but then it turns all too real and sinister? Amazing! But the execution of the idea didn’t work out for me.
Each of the three women’s plots shows a real understanding of each genre they’re representing – cozy mystery, horror, and YA dystopia. There is some diversity in the book, although it doesn’t show up until the third scenario. Celia is white, and the cozy mystery town she’s in seems to be entirely other white people. Allie is white and so are the other four college students she goes to the cabin with. Maggie is Latina, and she allies herself with a Black woman. It does make sense for the cozy mystery town to be lacking in diversity, especially if Celia had commented on it. This also would have allowed for some meta commenting on lack of diversity in cozies (although that has been improving in recent years.) Allie’s story felt the most cookie-cutter to me – right down to Allie having large breasts and hating them because men like them. There is such a surge of interest right now in Black horror and Indigenous horror stories, that this would have been a wonderful opportunity to explore that genre and bring some more diversity into the overall story.
Although the cover promised twists and surprises, I wasn’t surprised once by the plot in the book. I knew exactly where it was going from the first chapter. The only thing I didn’t know was how it was going to wrap everything up and, honestly, the ending was the most disappointing part of the book to me. While I’m sure some readers will enjoy it and find it cathartic, I found it to be too simple and little heavy-handed. (Speaking of heavy-handed, while I’m totally fine with a book having a message and even characters speaking that message out loud, the same message happens multiple times in this book in a way that I found to be a bit much.)
As someone who works in addiction and recovery, I found the depiction of a character’s ex who is addicted to cocaine to be very two-dimensional and insensitive to those who struggle with addiction. It is of course very difficult to be the family member of someone who struggles with addiction. But even a passing mention of “I know not everyone who uses cocaine ends up abusing their wife” or “I wish he would get clean so his daughter could know the real him” or “drugs didn’t make him an asshole – he just was one all along” would have been nice.
In a nutshell, this was an absolutely wonderful idea for a book with engagingly written scenes. But it fell apart for me in the overarching plot. Also, given the overall messaging of the book, it was a bit glaring that it didn’t have a more diverse set of three stories within the story. Recommended for genre readers who like the idea of seeing someone forced to live out a genre plot.
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3 out of 5 stars
Length: 320 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: Library
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Opinions of a Wolf 
Book Review: Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward
Just how much can real life -your own and others’ – inspire your fiction?
Summary:
In a lonely cottage overlooking the windswept Maine coast, Wilder Harlow begins the last book he will ever write. It is the story of his childhood summer companions and the killer that stalked the small New England town. Of the body they found, and the horror of that discovery echoing down the decades. And of Sky, Wilder’s one-time best friend, who stole his unfinished memoir and turned it into a lurid bestselling novel, Looking Glass Sound.
But as Wilder writes, the lines between memory and fiction blur. He fears he’s losing his grip on reality when he finds notes hidden around the cottage written in Sky’s signature green ink.
Catriona Ward delivers another mind-bending and cleverly crafted tale about one man’s struggle to come to terms with the terrors of his past… before it’s too late.
Review:
Based on my previous experience reading a Catriona Ward book, I came into this knowing as little as possible. I was concerned knowing too much would ruin the experience. Unlike her previous books, though, I think knowing something about what it’s about will actually help this book find the right audience. So let me tell you.
This book uses magical realism to explore how writers pull elements of the real world into their “fictional” stories. It explores just how acceptable that is. It also looks at how much a writer ends up living inside their own stories. All of this is wrapped up in a mystery story.
Here’s the thing. A lot of readers might go into this book expecting a mystery about a killer in a New England town with a shocking twist. That is not the trajectory of this book. It’s a very meta book about writing. It’s a book inside another book inside another book. It’s a little difficult to untwist and figure out what’s really going on and what’s fiction in this world.
I really respect the amount of work and plot development that went into this. The author had to write in multiple different styles as convincingly different authors. (Although I preferred The Villa by Rachel Hawkins for how it did a book inside another book – my review.) The meta commentary on writing is a literary exploration in navel-gazing that a lot of readers might enjoy. Except those who wanted the New England beach killer story with a twist. So this book might be struggling a bit to find its audience.
One thing that did bother me that should have been caught in editing is that these New England characters sometimes speak with a British affect. (There is one British character who, of course, should speak like a Brit.) I don’t mean they’re written with an accent but rather they sometimes say words or speak in a certain manner that I’ve only ever heard British people speak. (I was born in New England and have lived here all my life…so I know how we talk.)
The mystery was kind of mysterious but also not really the point of the book. The resolution left me scratching my head a bit, largely because of the magical realism aspects. I also felt like the message was a little garbled and unclear. It was a little bit of a letdown after the time investment, although I did appreciate it for its craft and structure.
Recommended to readers interested in a magical realism commentary on the writing process.
If you found this review helpful, please consider tipping me on ko-fi, checking out my digital items available in my ko-fi shop, buying one of my publications, using one of my referral/coupon codes, or signing up for my free microfiction monthly newsletter. Thank you for your support!
3 out of 5 stars
Length: 342 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: NetGalley
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)