Reviews with content warning for Death - A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

Reviews tagging 'Death'

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, by Holly Jackson

672 reviews

chloeanderson's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark emotional mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

xoravenreads's review

Go to review page

adventurous challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Love a good small town murder mystery and this one was so good!
Definitely requires a bit of suspension of disbelief as some of the things the main character does or is able to gain access to is a little unbelievable, but overall really enjoyed it!

Also recommend checking trigger warnings because there were a lot of things in this book I was not expecting

Content Warnings

erika4america's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark hopeful mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

I LOVED this book. It kept me guessing and guessing on who the killer of Andie Bell and Sal Singh could be. Most mystery books make it pretty obvious but never lay the groundwork in a meaningful way. This author does.

Every chapter kept me on my toes. At times I thought this book was reading my mind and then a curveball would be thrown in and I’d be left reeling.

I loved following along with Pip and Ravi making my own theories as they went. I also loved the subplot

Spoiler

of these two crushing hard on each other. It is what I like to call a sweet and slow burn. There’s something so wholesome about the both of them, I can’t help but root for them!

I love Pip. I love Ravi. I love Pip and Ravi together. But most importantly and to end this review properly. RIP Sal and RIP

Spoiler

Barney

Content Warnings

quinn4's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Content Warnings

huntress's review against another edition

Go to review page

mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.25

Content Warnings

3mmers's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

If only A Good Girls Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson was good all the way through I’d be happy to recommend it here. Unfortunately while most of it is great, the pre-climax is so bad that it cancelled the rest out and left me with a profoundly negative impression of the book overall.

I picked up A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder because, despite my bad experience with The Cheerleaders by Kara Thomas back in January, I wasn’t quite ready to discount the teen mystery genre as a whole. I had been assured that this one was definitely top of the heap. For the most part, I enjoyed it a lot, but it falls apart towards the climax. Its flaws are subjective; I’m happy to admit that most of the reason it soured on me so much was that it hit all my YA pet peeves and bugbears all at once. If you’ve got more tolerance for these sorts of things you’ll probably enjoy it more, because it is not, at its foundation, a bad book. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna hold back on complaining about it though.

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder follows high school senior Pippa Fitz-Amobi, who uses her senior year project as an excuse to personally reinvestigate the five year old murder of Andie Bell and subsequent suicide of her boyfriend and supposed killer Sal Singh. Pippa’s small town is certain that Singh was a murderer and his family the family of a monster, but Pippa can’t shake the conviction that something doesn’t add up. She joins forces with Sal’s younger brother Ravi, who is also certain of Sal’s innocence, but doesn’t have the social currency to pursue it. They quickly discover that the town’s recollection has flattened the tangled web of high school drama into a memory of Andie as a perfect popular girl taken from us too soon. Pippa uncovers a much darker picture: Andie wasn’t nice or well-liked, a bully with a troubled home life and undercover dealings. Worse, it seems like there is someone out there who knows what she is working on and is willing to do anything to keep her from uncovering the truth.

The first bad thing about the novel is that it has been obviously and mystifyingly localized. If you think about the story as taking place in a small town in England, rather than Connecticut, then a whole lot more stuff makes sense. Why is Pippa doing a weird specific year-long project that the book has to take a paragraph out to explain? Well, its an English A-level project. Why is there a network of frequently used commuter trains for Ravi to take to the next village every day? It’s England. Why is there a conveniently located creepy wood right next to the town? A lot of English villages are like that since many woods are common land that is protected from development. The localization doesn’t take too long to get over, it’s mostly bad because of how unnecessary it is. North America has had three eras of British Invasion at this point (too soon?), I think readers can handle a British book setting. The one arena that the localization does become genuinely destructive is in the book’s racial politics (Good Girl’s Guide has those, I know, I was surprised too). A key element of the mystery is that part of the reason the town was so willing to accept the narrative that Sal was a vicious murderer was that Andie was white and Sal was not. One of the first people Pippa interviews is a clearly racist journalist who covered the murder writing biased pieces about how Sal was obviously a monster because aren’t they all /s. Pippa’s step dad and half-brother are both Nigerian, and her love for them is a big motivation behind pursuing the case, since she has seen the town use the murder as a thin excuse to ostracise the Singhs. At least for me, the setting is a crucial element to this. While racism isn’t better across the pond, it is different. I think the element loses some of its meaning when the Singhs are American rather than when they are British Indians. It’s the spectre of colonialism. Personally, I’ve always though the sense of place was a key element of narrative. Stories that are intended to take place anywhere rarely work for me (condolences to Ace of Spades) because they lack the feeling of specificity and tend to feel artificial as a result. The novel feels confused and, frankly, poorly researched. The bad localization feels disrespectful to the initial intention of the author, and leaves the book weaker overall.

Fortunately, its pretty easy to look past most of the localization because this is a book that really uses its premise to its advantage. I’ve written often about how books set themselves up for failure by choosing a difficult premise and then executing it poorly, but this is a case of the opposite. Jackson seems to appreciate that we’re here for teens solving crimes, rather than for how difficult and annoying it would realistically be for a teen to solve a crime, so Pippa has her school project to open doors. She is successfully able to contact basically everyone she needs to, even if they’re not all honest with her. Far more of the book is devoted to uncovering clues than wondering what to do next and angsting about crime and danger. The lack of angst is a huge highlight. Pippa is actually pretty mercenary for a teenager. She knows what she wants and doesn’t have all that many qualms about getting it. If she can’t thing of an honest way to get the information she wants, she quickly turns to dishonest or even criminal ones without really thinking about the consequences. This is an interesting character choice regardless, but it works especially well here because it means Pippa’s whole personality is built around being the kind of person who’d solve mysteries as a teenager. A lot of writers tend to talk about characters as if they are independent people who’s lives happen to be exciting enough to document. In reality, every aspect of character is the writer’s choice. They’re artificial, not organic. All that matters is that they’re consistent enough to be believable (this is foreshadowing for Good Girl’s Guide’s no good very bad climax). A writer can choose to make a character with convenient personality traits or abilities, or choose one that creates narratively interesting challenges, but too often characters are blamed for boring challenges or inconvenient abilities that make the book worse, as if the author has no control over the matter. Pippa is a great protagonist because she wants to get the story moving just as much as the audience does, which makes the teen limitations go down a lot smoother. It is hugely to Good Girl’s Guide’s benefit that it embraces the fact that a teenager determined to dig up the truth about a five year old murder is not always going to act like a normal person. It works that Pippa is a little too single-minded and obsessed with the case because it takes a single-minded and obsessive person to do something like this.

The plot keeps chugging along largely thanks to Pippa’s determination. It’s not just the personality that helps. The plot beats generally are structured to preserve the momentum of the case. When Pippa is faced with a setback, or a lead dries up, new progress quickly follows from completely different channels.

Spoiler

When Pippa and Ravi fail to find Andie’s burner phone, they are able to turn up her agenda instead. After Pippa exhausts the leads of all Andie’s friends, she happens to meet Andie’s sister, unexpectedly home from university.

Door closed, window open. It means Pippa always has something to do, rather than waiting for new plot threads to drop in on her from above. The better the plotting is the harder it is to appreciate. The nuts and bolts of a good plot tend to slip by unnoticed because the whole point of a good plot is to enable to reader to enjoy the surface level drama of the story, not to draw attention to themselves. It is most easily appreciated in contrast with a less well executed story. Hello The Cheerleaders, convenient of you to wander by right now!

One of the major plot beats of The Cheerleaders is that towards the end of the novel,

Spoiler

protagonist Monica arranges an interview with the titular cheerleaders’ coach Allie. Monica has reason to believe that the cheerleaders might have confided their private problems in their coach.

It makes sense for this interview to be in the book and it’s a logical lead for the mystery. Despite that, it is not executed well.

Spoiler

Monica never asks Allie about the private problems of the cheerleaders as was her intention, instead interrogating her about her personal relationships, something that has no connection to the case. Of course, it does turn out to be relevant several chapters later when the old boyfriend shows back up, and the reader knows to anticipate it from pov shifts, but there is no reason for Monica to think it is important. The plot beat of the Allie interview brings the (limited) momentum of the story to a halt because Monica learns nothing and conducts herself so poorly she loses credibility and ends up less able to continue her investigation. With all the leads bringing about no progress at all we just have to wait and slog through Monica’s many exhausting meaningless freakouts until the boyfriend shows back up.

It’s not inherently bad for a character to hit a wall and to be out of obvious options, but that does do something to the overall momentum and tension of the plot, so it has to be carefully managed. Monica encounters so many walls and false starts that she barely makes any progress at all. The problem is threefold: first, the wall feels contrived since Monica never actually acknowledges she didn’t even attempt to get the information she was looking for, second, the plot gets solved by happenstance, not Monica pursuing an unexpected arena for more information, and third, this is a mystery novel and we’re here for mystery solving.

In Good Girl’s Guide, the closest parallel scene is Pippa’s interview with Emily.

Spoiler

After Pippa happens upon Andie’s sister Becca, who is understandably unwilling to talk about the murders, she is left with little directly relevant information, so she contacts Becca’s friend Emily to interview her about the Bell’s home life. It feels like progress because all this information is relevant to the case in any number of ways. Emily sheds light on the toxic competitive dynamic between the sisters and on their domineering and misogynistic father.

Pippa, unlike Monica, consistently makes accurate inferences from the information given, so these details help her overhaul her suspects list. This conversation also provides information that becomes unexpectedly relevant later:

Spoiler

Becca ditched Emily at a party and then vanished for the rest of the evening, the beginning of a long mental health crisis from which Becca never really recovered. It works because it comes up naturally in the conversation. Monica doesn’t have any reason to believe Allie’s years old relationship would be important, but it makes perfect sense for Emily to explain that actually she and Becca hadn’t actually been friends for months before the murder.

It doesn’t feel crowbarred in anticipating the climactic twist. The underlying plot elements of these two interviews are that one gives the protagonist new information, even if its not immediately obvious which parts are useful, and the other leaves the protagonist with no new information and a bridge burned. Sure, that may be more realistic — people tend to be sensitive about murder and being really obsessed with reinvestigation a death can be bad for ol mental health — but its not as interesting. While the destructive nature of single-minded obsession is a theme, it’s not more important than the plot.

Earlier I described Monica’s angsting about the morality of her actions in The Cheerleaders as ‘meaningless’ and I want to explore that a little more because it leads us into the par of Good Girl’s Guide that ruined the last book for me. I have a very low tolerance for purely internal arcs that consist of a lot of self-reflection and very little action. This was a big problem I had with Thorn by Insitar Khanani and a problem I had with The Cheerleaders. It’s partially a me thing and partially because I’m an adult. Self-reflection tends to be a lot less tolerable when you’ve outgrown the age group. It’s an issue in The Cheerleaders because while it is clear that this book wants to be about how this level of obsession is self-destructive, it is also unwilling to admit that Monica is a bad person. She has the set up of the investigation ruining her life but no awareness of it and few consequences (the lack of agency is a contributing factor — Monica’s obsession with the case is hollow because she never really chooses to pursue leads, advancements in the case just happen by coincidence). Similarly, in Good Girl’s Guide, the murder investigation clearly starts to take over Pippa’s life as she ditches her friends to follow leads, breaks the law, and neglects her studies. The difference is that Pippa is conscious of this and intentionally chooses to pursue it. Even though she logically understands it is the wrong thing to do in the long run, she does reap the benefits of uncovering the truth. It’s compelling because even tough she is losing the ‘good girl’ she used to be, she is gaining something too. Pippa’s commitment to the case and her lack of scruples about pursuing it was my favourite part of the novel. It’s one of the few ways I found Pippa relatable. And then she stopped doing anything like that and for two chapters was a wailing fearful baby prepared to ditch everything because she was IN TOO DEEP (ominous timpani) (fart noise).

Okay okay let’s back it up. Major spoilers ahead (obviously).

Spoiler

For a few months now Pippa has been dogged by anonymous notes threatening her with nebulous consequences for continuing the investigation. Initially, she writes them off as a tasteless prank, but they start to get to her as they get closer and closer to her personal life, indicating that the sender is aware of her progress and of the people she cares about. My first problem with this is that Pippa decides not to tell Ravi about the notes. This is a huge bugbear for me. I hate it when characters don’t share their problems for no particular reason. But Em! Just because it’s not rational doesn’t mean it’s not narratively justified; it’s an emotional reaction! Don’t care. ‘Protecting’ an ally by hiding information that ought logically to be shared never reads for me. It always comes across as dumb and contrived. I hate it. I especially hate it because Pippa is otherwise characterized as a very rational person with a reputation for thoughtfulness. It was immensely refreshing for me when she immediately let Ravi in on the investigation, to her obvious benefit. There is no good reason for her in particular to keep the threats under her hat, other than that this is a YA novel so that’s practically fucking required. To her credit, Pippa takes steps to track down the sender. Before she can; however, the notes finally follow through on their threats, kidnapping her dog until she destroys all her findings. Pippa freaks the fuck out. The tone immediately flips from a surprisingly cool and ruthless teenager to a weeping mess, self-pityingly moaning about how ‘its all her fault.’ She immediately acquiesces, destroying all her notes and her computer and resolving to lie to Ravi because ‘she has to hurt him to protect him.’ Oh fuck off you dippy moo.

This may sound cold, and it is. What can I say; I’m a bitch and a hater. A big part of my revulsion is that I am not a person that is interested in or good at expressing big wet emotions; they make me uncomfortable and, yes, resentful.

Spoiler

I wanted to go back to reading about the proactive calculating character I cared about, not this mushy sop who didn’t seem to realize that the kind of person who would murder a high schooler might not care about holding up their end of a bargain. Worse, I hate the moaning about protecting people that Pippa has no right to protect.

I hate the ‘hurt a person to protect them’ trope so much. It’s always lazy. It’s always contrived. It’s always boring. Authors, I am begging you, FIND A NEW TROPE. As a sidenote, the ‘hurt someone to protect them’ thin is so fucking condescending.

Spoiler

What right does Pippa have to decide what risks Ravi should take? It’s a murder case about his brother that affects his life. In Good Girl’s Guide in particular this whole section feels out of character. Why would such a logical character panic like this? Wouldn’t she think it through a bit, even if she did eventually go through with a primarily emotional response? Why wouldn’t she tell Ravi, a person she has every reason to trust? In the end it turns out that Pippa didn’t permanently delete any of her work, it was all backed up on the cloud, making this section even more unnecessary. Ravi easily figures out she is lying to him and she immediately (like, within two paragraphs) reverts back to her regular self, dog forgotten in favour of the thrill of the chase. Why couldn’t it have been like that the whole time, other than this is what you’re supposed to do for the pre-climax of your teen mystery novel I guess.

After that the book never recovers. Gotta be honest, at this point I was just finishing it for completion purposes. It put me in such a profoundly bad mood it was affection my real life. The ending has some twists but I was so put off by the previous section that they rang hollow, though, to be fair, the ending could have been The Sixth Sense and I still wouldn’t have cared. I’m not sure what to say other than I don’t understand the appeal of these emo plotlines. I am reading a mystery novel for the mystery, not for the emotional breakdown. Good Girl’s Guide’s two sequels are still on my reading list, but its going to be a long time before I’m ready to jump back in to this series.

Content Warnings