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A review by nella580
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson
3.0
Holy Veronica Mars, what a mess this was. I will say, this book certainly knows its audience. I wouldn’t call it bad. A lot was really right here. The tone the author was going for was achieved. That precocious, spunky girl with tenacity and naïveté to help her solve the greatest mystery of her town. I mean, like I said, Veronica Mars quirkiness and reference to pancakes and hot chocolate that’s basically mandatory of white middle class characterization. (It’s supposed to feel wholesome, I think. Idk.) I can definitely appreciate the plotting and mindfulness to her cast the author showed here. It is a YA novel, after all. For me, though, this was messy. A lot of messy devices to help drive the story along.
First-person then third-person narrations were jarring. And I get it, the “Pippa log” or whatever her diary was called was a convenient device to state out exposition without clunky buildup. Just blah it on the page. Easy. But the first-person narration didn’t read as a believable diary. It read as an author’s device and I kept getting irritated at the switch back to third-person.
The cast was also really large and really shallow. Which, agin, is convenient to use as a device to not have to build story around your characters. But I kept forgetting who was who or the significance of anyone. If you include a thousand people in your universe, none of them really matter and it’s all just done with a red herring intent.
The outcome was obviously a driving factor for some of the positive reception of this book. (I’m sure lots of things were. I can see this resonating with a lot of young women.) Just a crazy-bananas outcome that happily tied everything right up. Everything always worked out (mostly) and everyone was stage-directed to all the right places for Pippa to sagely educate the town on the downfalls of blind, careless prejudice.
This is the Taylor Swift of novels. Cute. Going heavily for charming. Definitely for a specific, targeted demographic, and leans into that fact in a smart way. Not for me, but I can see why others like it.
First-person then third-person narrations were jarring. And I get it, the “Pippa log” or whatever her diary was called was a convenient device to state out exposition without clunky buildup. Just blah it on the page. Easy. But the first-person narration didn’t read as a believable diary. It read as an author’s device and I kept getting irritated at the switch back to third-person.
The cast was also really large and really shallow. Which, agin, is convenient to use as a device to not have to build story around your characters. But I kept forgetting who was who or the significance of anyone. If you include a thousand people in your universe, none of them really matter and it’s all just done with a red herring intent.
The outcome was obviously a driving factor for some of the positive reception of this book. (I’m sure lots of things were. I can see this resonating with a lot of young women.) Just a crazy-bananas outcome that happily tied everything right up. Everything always worked out (mostly) and everyone was stage-directed to all the right places for Pippa to sagely educate the town on the downfalls of blind, careless prejudice.
This is the Taylor Swift of novels. Cute. Going heavily for charming. Definitely for a specific, targeted demographic, and leans into that fact in a smart way. Not for me, but I can see why others like it.