Review: Good Me, Bad Me by Ali Land

Good Me, Bad Me by Ali Land
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If I had to pick one word to describe Good Me, Bad Me, it would be ‘intriguing’. Though I wouldn’t say it’s a complete, non-stop thrill ride, there was definite intrigue throughout the book.

Following Milly integrating back into normal society after years of living with her serial killer mother was fascinating, if not a little mundane which was really to be expected. There was something about the writing style that kept me wanting to read, the little breadcrumbs you’re fed throughout the book made me want to continue. I wanted to know more details about the case and I wanted to learn more about how Milly would cope with her new lifestyle. The build up and dribbles of information at a time, accompanied by short chapters, made this book a breeze to get through. However, there were small hiccups through the book which could get a little frustrating at times. Sometimes Milly’s sentence structure came across very Yoda-like and though I knew it was meant to be serous, it did cause me to giggle at times. There’d be times when she’s narrating and would go into a quote by someone else, but most of the time there’s no sign like quotation marks used to show you when someone has stopped or started talking and at times that made it hard to follow when the quotes had stopped and she had continued her narrative. The characters seemed pretty cookie cutter from most media outlets I’d seen of similar stories. Like the kind foster family who seem perfect, but have deep set troubles of their own. One of the parents being happier than the other, the biological child being nothing but a brat with terrible attitude who gives the narrator stick for everything. It’s very cliché in that sense. Milly herself wasn’t the most exciting character either, written as another typical trope of outsider trying to fit in. The most interesting thing about her was the case she was involved in.

Overall, Good Me, Bad Me, is a book that didn’t pull me in with care for the characters of what happened to any of them and most of the time the breadcrumbs led to predictable trails. But the story about the trial and case itself is what I stayed for and those parts were fascinating enough to keep me reading until the end.