By: Elle Kennedy
I really like to use BookTok and Instagram to discover new authors or books. I have found some really great books this way (Christina Lauren and Ali Hazelwood immediately come to mind). I saw a lot of chatter about this book, so I borrowed it from my local library. This was a miscalculation on my part. I really disliked this book. In fairness, some of this is my personal preference; I am not thrilled with a dual POV novel. It also includes one of my most hated tropes: the bet. I despise this plot device because I cannot ever forgive the cruelty of the initial plan. I did not realize this would be a main part of the story and I probably would not have picked this book up had I known that in advance.
MacKenzie “Mac” Cabot is the only child of a famous politician father and a society mother. She has been raised in extreme luxury. Since high school, she has been dating a family friend, Preston. Preston’s family is obscenely wealthy, such that he will often ride a helicopter home from college to have Sunday dinners with his parents (MUST BE NICE, KID.) Preston is also an entitled shit and in his character introduction he attempts to sexually assault a waitress at a bar. He is truly terrible. Mac, however, does not know about Pukey Preston. She is a few years younger than him. He has been away at college and Mac took a gap year after high school to travel and work on her business, which is basically a revenge website where people post stories about their ex-partners. It also has made her a millionaire in her own right. (I make poor life choices; I absolutely should have done this.) She has not been in the same city as him for several years and it seems she never came to visit him at college, because she doesn’t know any of his friends. She is now enrolled at the same college as Preston and apparently has no friends of her own, because no one has told her he is a genuinely bad, bad dude.
Cooper Hartley is a sexy bad boy with many tattoos. You know the type. He has a twin brother, Evan, and they grew up in a neglectful household. I forgot what exactly happened to their father, but their mother is a deadbeat who left home while the boys were in high school. Their uncle became their guardian, but basically these boys were wild and ran with a pack of other children who made terrible decisions. My main issue with the character of Cooper (and there are MANY), is that he was written so that we, as the reader, were able to understand his thoughts and feelings but he rarely acted or said these feelings out loud to Mac. It is written so that we sympathize with understanding for poor, unloved Cooper, but his actions and words to Mac were often in direct contradiction to those thoughts. SHE DOESN’T KNOW ANY OF HIS THOUGHTS so I felt their whole relationship was toxic.
I do want to mention that I had to keep reminding myself that the main characters were still fairly young, making some of this drama slightly more palatable. There is a part near the end of the novel where there is a party celebrating Mac’s 21st birthday, which reminded me that these were all just young little dummies.
There is a lot of time spent on Mac’s firm stance against cheating, which comes through while she is basically cheating on her long-term boyfriend, which was really hypocritical. Also, we the reader knows that Preston is truly a horrible person, but Mac does not know this information, so it feels slimy. Mac is in desperate need of a get-a-grip friend, but honestly any friend will do. She ends up becoming fairly close to some of the girls in Cooper’s friend group, which is fine, but I do worry that Mac has a pattern in relationships of doing whatever her boyfriend at the time is doing; these do not seem to be her personal choices.
Look, I think this was supposed to be a bad boy who just needed to be shown love from a good girl-type of thing, but it just did not work for me.
Rating: 2/5
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Girl-Complex-Avalon-Novel-ebook/dp/B092T81VVY/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=1BRLXET53O471&keywords=good+girl+complex&qid=1650570890&sprefix=good+girl+%2Caps%2C260&sr=8-1
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/good-girl-complex-elle-kennedy/1140314667?ean=9781250796738
Or, as always, an independent bookstore!