Reviews with content warning for Child death - Good Me Bad Me

read this for my book club, I voted against it when it came time to narrow down the list of books but it made it through anyway (twice!) so i was already biased against it when it came time to read it, but i did try very hard to give it a chance.

i've seen a lot of reviews criticize the writing style and while i didn't prefer it don't feel like it warrants a criticism as such, i feel like it does a decent job of putting you in milly's headspace where she's constantly in a state of flight or fight (or fight-flight-freeze-fawn i think it is now) and to that effect it works. i mean i didn't really enjoy it but i did understand and i think this one is just a matter of taste

however,

i really disliked the book itself. the whole time i felt like the author had definitely done research into how abused children act and think because the whole milly hates her mother/milly loves her mother/milly misses her mother/milly is terrified of her mother thing felt very true and heartbreaking, but then how the story resolves......

honestly i should have seen it coming. and by "it" i mean the author's note where the author reveals that she worked as a child psychologist and thanks her patients and says they were the basis of this book (??) and without them it wouldn't exist (!!!). i need you to know that throughout the entire book, i hated mike, the psychologist dad. i felt like it was an unbelievable conflict of interest to have him be both her psychologist AND her foster parent and was fully expecting a nasty twist with him, especially when milly finds out that he's trying to write a book about her which is both gross and exploitative. but then nothing happens because..................................... he is the stand in for the author?! unbelievable.

i had more compassion for phoebe than the author seemed to, writing her with almost no nuance at all solely to justify what happens to her at the end. girl is in a home where they desperately need family therapy but will never get it because apparently her father thinks he's all they need, where her mother had such severe post partum depression that she had to be hospitalized, where her father keeps bringing home foster children and ignoring his first daughter. not to justify the things phoebe does, but why is it when milly's older brother acts out and does awful to get away from his family, he is given compassion and understanding for what he does, but then phoebe is demonized and gets killed?

additionally i got a weird misogyny vibe that's hard to pin down as intentional and somewhat understandable in the narrative or the author's thoughts coming through. similar vibe to gillian flynn and this is NOT a complement, because i've read enough of flynn's work to know she personally genuinely hates women. i think milly having severe internalized misogyny is understandable considering what happened to her in her life, but again it's hard to say whether that's what the author intended or whether it was the author's true feelings coming out. really off vibe, especially about the foster family mother and the way milly talks about her. did not like this.

anyway this book made me realize that the british children's tv show Brum about a sentient car is named that because instead of saying cars and vehicles go "vroom vroom" in england they say "brum brum" which is pretty funny and a really late in life realization to have lmao

Content Warnings