So I haven't ever read Gone Girl, aside from the "Cool Girl" speech everyone likes to quote every now and then on the internet. Therefore I can't realSo I haven't ever read Gone Girl, aside from the "Cool Girl" speech everyone likes to quote every now and then on the internet. Therefore I can't really compare The Good Girl to it as everyone else seems to be doing, but I should hope that Gone Girl packs more oomph than this book.
This book wants to be three things at once: a family psychodrama, an investigative mystery, and a shitty YA romance with the usual undertones of abuse and Stockholm Syndrome held up as the second coming of love stories.
The story is told from three perspectives, each of which embodies these things. We have the mother of the titular Girl, representing the family psychodrama. The detective, the mystery. And the kidnapper is, of course, the YA love interest.
The mother's chapters are, frankly, boring. She is a one-note character, helplessly grieving her daughter's kidnapping. Her husband, the father, is equally one-note: the trope of the callous, heartless, rich business man. Other than providing some family history and a brief glimpse into when she met her husband, she said nothing interesting. I got no real sense of who this woman was besides her daughter's mother, her husband's wife. She had no other thoughts or musings to impart. (view spoiler)[Even her dalliance with the detective was told mostly from his POV (hint, he was physically attracted to her, her husband was Lex Luthor, and they grew close over the disappearance of her daughter. That's pretty much it.) (hide spoiler)]
Then the detective. He seemed like he belonged in another book. He was kind of dumb and was apparently very Italian. He doggedly investigates the mystery of the girl's disappearance but due to the book's "shocking twist", his efforts were mostly fruitless. He discovers where the kidnapper was hiding at least, but not until after taking us through dead-end interviews and false leads.
Then we have the kidnapper. He gets the most "meat" on him of all the characters, and thus, is the most interesting. A fearsome criminal pays him to kidnap the girl and bring her to him, where he would then hold her for ransom. Of course, he wusses out because he is just smitten with her, you guys! So he takes her to a far-away cabin out in the woods, where they end up having some class-clashing discussions and eventually fall in love! Rich girl and poor boy, learning to understand each other and love each other, how sweet. Except when he is brutalizing her by tying her up, beating her when she attempts escape, and menacing her with a gun. But other than that it's the stuff of true romance.
ಠ_ಠ
No. Nope, sorry. It was just gross. Gross because of the implications, but also just regular gross, as they had been squatting in a cabin for months and were, by their own admission, stinky.
I can't delve into why this book didn't work without revealing the twist at the end, so from here on out will be spoiler-tagged.
(view spoiler)[ It turns out that, in the very last chapter, the Girl reveals that it was SHE all along who arranged her own kidnapping!
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This retroactively makes the entire story make no sense. And it makes it frustrating.
Have you ever watched a movie where the whole conflict would be solved if the characters just said that ONE THING. That thing they needed to say? Because all of the girl's woes would have been avoided if she had just told her kidnapper that she was the one who arranged it all. She said some BS like she was "scared" but come on. A simple, "Where are you going? You need to take me to Criminal Who Hired You, because I'm in on this whole thing and you're gonna spoil my plan, dude."
And what WAS her grand plan? Apparently she wanted to stick it to her old man, on account of him being a big fat jerk. ....And??
Phase 1: Get dangerous criminal to kidnap me to extort my dad for ransom Phase 2: ? Phase 3: PROFIT!
If her plan was so important to her, why did she allow her kidnapper to ruin it? What if the head criminal hadn't held up his end of the deal? Why would this supposed professional criminal mastermind hire a boy so easily swayed into scrapping the plan? Why wouldn't he just use one of his goons? Surely he has goons, what's the point of being a criminal mastermind without goons?
Why couldn't the girl stick it to her old man like any self-respecting rich white girl? Party a lot, crash a BMW or two, and marry the wrong guy and make her parents deal with him every Christmas.
Riley Tatum is a state cop in Virginia with a dark past. She was a teenaged runaway, kidnapped and left unconscious on the streets. She escaped somethRiley Tatum is a state cop in Virginia with a dark past. She was a teenaged runaway, kidnapped and left unconscious on the streets. She escaped something terrible, and now, years later, she's finding girls left the same way. Only these girls are dead. A serial killer named the Shark is active once again, and Riley is plagued by the mystery of what made him spare her life. And now she's coming to the horrifying realization that he might want to finish the job with her.
Pretty good stuff, right? I wanted a gritty true crime story, with mystery and suspense. Serial killers! Death! A woman spared but why? All great seeds for an amazing story. What I got was a tepid, predictable affair interjected with cringey romance. I've heard creepier, more visceral tales on YouTube "Let's Not Meet" stories.
The minor annoyances kicked off right away. There's a lot of As You Know speech between Riley and her various colleagues. As a result, their dialogue is peppered with things they'd never organically say in real conversations. It reads like they are trying to educate their audience about crime scenes and forensics. It's very jarring. Mary Burton, your audience is not this dumb, I promise you. If we are reading one of your crime dramas, rest assured we are probably familiar with Barney-level knowledge about how these things work.
In the same vein of assuming her audience might be learning disabled, there's lots of repetition too. For example, during the scene with Riley and her adopted daughter Hanna, on page 45 there's "...Maria...also offered Hanna a bed in their house when Riley worked nights. Theirs wasn't a perfect, model family, but it worked; they were doing okay." Then, on page 49, "And now, the two of them had forged a kind of family that worked, and she would not let anything from the past ruin it.". There's more repetition of this nature throughout, especially when exploring Riley and Clay's memories of their past relationship. Same turns of phrases, repeated ideas. We get it!
Another beef is that there's literally no other women except Riley in this story that doesn't fill either a wife/girlfriend/familial role, or prostitutes. Every single other cop she meets, or any other professional in a tertiary capacity she deals with, is a dude. It's irritating. The narrative talks about how special and amazing Riley is, and while it doesn't rise to Mary Sue levels, I wonder if the dearth of meaningful female characters around her was just so to emphasize her specialness.
The killer and his motivations were sorely lacking. The Shark killed the girls based on whether he wins or loses a card game, and if he wins he always chooses Death. And, being the Shark, he almost never loses. But it lacks any real terror. He doesn't even kill the girls himself! The loser has to kill them. Life or death stakes killers can be very terrifying and effective, like Anton Chigurh in the movie No Country for Old Men. Anton gets his OWN hands dirty though, and he is menacing and evil in a way the Shark just isn't. The Shark called to mind more Bond villain than serial killer. Another aspect of the Shark's modus operandi is that he chooses girls with a very specific look, as he is obsessed with this idea of Lady Luck and the girls need to look like her in his mind. Again, I can think of countless other killers from popular media with the same MOs that are way better. Coupled with the ineffectual killer himself, the ultimate reveal around Riley's mystery and who the Shark's accomplice in her case turned out to be was underwhelming. I saw it coming a mile away and it wasn't even well done. Hint, it turns out to be the one guy still alive who isn't a cop.
The biggest offender is the romance though. Clay was Riley's instructor at the academy and they fell in lust. Gag me, older man in power with young ingenue. They hook up, and it's treated like the ultimate lovemaking in both their memories, but it was really just a shitty hook up after which Clay basically threw her out like a whore. Turns out he was Oh! So! Conflicted! about the fact that his wife had died a mere 6 months before boning Riley and he felt so guilty, thereby justifying his shitty treatment of her. The first time we see him, he basically swoops in like some kind of knight and does Riley's job for her apprehending a criminal. The narrative tells me Riley is hyper-competent but then it undermines it in pretty much the first scene! Then, later, he STALKS her outside her house, spying on her in her living room and shit. It's supposed to be romantic, how he's still pining for her after all this time and how he's so very sorry for how he treated her. And she doesn't even remember his face, which I found hard to believe because it was only 5 years ago. They end up working together on the Shark case and each constantly reminisce to themselves about that shitty hook up and there was really no chemistry between them. Clay is mostly physically obsessed with her and throws little backhanded jabs about how his dead wife was such a dud compared to the young, luminous Riley, even though he apparently adored his late wife. This did not endear me to him at all. And Riley is mostly confused and walled-off, overthinking this shitty, SHITTY hook up they had and trying to wring profundity out of it. NO GIRL, NO. You can do better than some old has-been creep with baggage the size of train cars.
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