A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

Author: Holly Jackson

Genre: Young Adult / Mystery

Format: Paperback

Pages: 390

This one was a hard one for me to rate because there was a lot I liked about the book at the start, but the last maybe eighty pages are so kind of ruined this for me. A part of me thought about giving this a lower star, but after sitting with it a few days I realized that I didn't hate a large portion of the book. There were only one or two things that I didn't like toward the end.

What I will say is this book makes it so easy for me to play along with the investigation. I had tabs running through this books about theories that our main character Pip maybe didn't think about, or that half handed comments made me think about. It was one of my favorite things about this book is the mystery was solid enough, and the clues obvious enough that as you read you start to build the picture around Pip and Ravi's investigation.

For me, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder is set up like a Veronic Mars episode if Veronica had better mental health. Our main character Pip is a "good girl": homework done on time, great friends, rarely in serious trouble. And I fully believe that this project to try to prove Sal was innocent wasn't meant to derail like it had. I think Pip's intentions at the start were to cast a shadow over the story the police and news media threw over the story. However, sometimes good intentions aren't enough, and I liked that at some point that Pip realized maybe "good" wasn't what she was anymore.

I also really liked that as Pip worked on her personal essay she started to realize that. That we got to see that this case, or "investigation", was changing her and while she wasn't sure what that meant she was walking away from it. Mostly because, while "good" wasn't what Pip was, she wasn't turning "bad" by any means. She still cared about the people around her.

The story itself was solid up until a point. I thought it moved quickly but didn't leave me behind to wonder how we got from point A to point B. I really liked that Pip got it wrong a lot and wasn't just instantly good at this. Yes, I fully believe that a lot of this wouldn't happen in real life, but for sake of the fiction part of this, I let it slide. Like I mention this could have easily been an episode of Veronica Mars, and I wasn't mad about that. I also wasn't mad about the actual ending of the story. It answered a couple of questions I had right out of the gate, and while it wasn't the solid happy ending a lot of people wanted, it felt right to me.

Now, the thing I could have done without. Honestly the whole section with Mr. Ward. While I won't go into details because of spoilers for those who haven't read the book. I honestly really could have done without it. For me, it all sort of felt like filler. rushed, and disjointed. Almost like the pieces nearly fit but didn't quite match up. I know the point was to explain away a party of the mystery, but I feel like there was maybe better ways to explain it away. Like with Mr. Bell maybe. I don't know, while I understood where Holly Jackson was going with this part of the story, it didn't feel like it belonged to the story. It seems like such a small thing, but with that part of the story line up with the rest of the ending, it's hard to look past.

I'm not sure if I'll pick up the next book in the series. There were a lot of things to enjoy in this book, really, and I see why people love it. Just that one little piece is annoying me. Maybe I'll snag it from the library. I liked Pip and Ravi as characters, liked their friendship. This was a quick and mostly enjoyable read.

HAPPY READING!!