A review by uraveragelesbianreader
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson

adventurous mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

0.5

I really really wanted to like this book I wanted to understand why everyone else liked this book. This book was the most boring simple unrealistic juvenile novel I have ever had the misfortune of reading and this is the first book that has ever genuinely made me wish I DNF books. In fact, although I used to be throughly against DNFing especially for books that I had paid for, this book changed my stance on that I can now wholly understand what may make a book so horrible even if you spent your own money on it that it would be worse to keep reading than to just end the suffering. First the plot, your average wattpad book written by a 15 year old child about Harry Styles has a better plot than this novel.  Every plot twist spends too long building up holds too little relevance in the actual story and then for the next twenty or so pages the author pats themselves on the back about how smart and genius the plotwist was through the characters. Im not sure if the author was intending to lean away from old tropes or embrace them fully OR twist them in some way but whatever they tried to do they failed. About 50ish pages in I was able to guess the entire plot in sequence correctly with only a few minor exceptions. Nothing that happens in this novel feels earned, it either feels massively predictable or thrown from some 4th dimension in an attempt to make the novel seem as if It is actually smart. Here I must also get into the characters, not only is the plot illogical so are the characters. Quite literally these characters are not real but I literally had to close the book on more than one occasion because people just do not say stuff like that or act like that in real life. I feel like the author was homeschooled as a child OR went to a pretentious boarding school and had no friends because their entire knowledge of teenagers and how they act comes from river dale (river dale in fact does a better job portraying teenagers!) and do not get me started on the main romance. For one, why the hell does he act like that??? He is like 20 and she is 17-18 and yes that age gap is legal but he is a grown man who could have a job (does he have a job???? does he go to school??? or does he just follow around little girls and sulk around a town thinking about how everybody hates him which I'm sure that has nothing to do with the fact that he is repeatedly a massive douhcebag at even the slightest inconvenience but of course this is played off as funny) he would be in his 2-3rd year at university and she's in grade 12 that's odd especially because neither of their ages have massive relevance to the plot. The fact that he is not even the worst character in the novel is the real kicker. Oh my god was the main character insufferable I genuinely could not stand her. The plot of this novel put simply is this girl showing up and interviewing traumatized people about an event that traumatized them FOR A SCHOOL PROJECT????? And she is a massive freak about it too. She's about as interesting as a stale moldy loaf of bread and I assume she is the authors self insert in the novel. I actually enjoy perfectionist characters and obsessed artists types who do questionable things for their art but Pippa is not this she's just a weirdo. If the novel showed her as creepily obsessed I think It would have not only served the plot but I would have enjoyed it far far more. Instead, we get some random girl nosing around and being shocked that this has consequence's. If I went into every issue this novel had I would end up writing a novel longer and more interesting than the novel itself. I give it .5 only because at a certain point it picked up a comedic value to me and if I imagined the scene occurring with slapstick clown music playing behind it it became bearable. I understand enjoying cringey bad books I do so myself, avidly so even, but I have never seen someone admit this book is bad or read it for that purpose and even when I tried to read it like that there was just nothing that made it worth it for me. I genuinely cannot recommend this book to anyone and if I had to pick between shitting in my hands and doing the macarena and reading this book again then get the toilet paper and start the music.