A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson Series: A Good Girl's Guide to Murder #1
Published by Random House Children's Books on January 5, 2021
Genres: Young Adult Fiction / Law & Crime, Young Adult Fiction / Social Themes / Prejudice & Racism, Young Adult Fiction / Thrillers & Suspense / General
Pages: 400
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781984896391Everyone in Fairview knows the story. Pretty and popular high school senior Andie Bell was murdered by her boyfriend, Sal Singh, who then killed himself. It was all anyone could talk about. And five years later, Pip sees how the tragedy still haunts her town.
But she can't shake the feeling that there was more to what happened that day. She knew Sal when she was a child, and he was always so kind to her. How could he possibly have been a killer?
Now a senior herself, Pip decides to reexamine the closed case for her final project, at first just to cast doubt on the original investigation. But soon she discovers a trail of dark secrets that might actually prove Sal innocent . . . and the line between past and present begins to blur. Someone in Fairview doesn't want Pip digging around for answers, and now her own life might be in danger.
I actually found my first review of this back in the early days of this blog and oh boy, the cringe! Please don’t go and read it, I am begging you.
I do still agree with my past self that this book was amazing and perfect! Such a great murder mystery with diverse and fully-fleshed out characters, including the perpetrators involved in the Andie Bell and Sal Singh murders.
Setting this up as a senior capstone project made it more believable that all of this could be done. I’ve seen some discussion of how Pip falls into the white savior trope, but I do believe that this is mitigated quickly in the beginning. We find out when she talks with Ravi, Sal’s little brother, that he’s tried to find answers for years and everyone ignores him. He actually says something along the lines of how Pip will have an easier time getting answers specifically because it’s for a school project. Plus, at the end of the novel, Pip tells the whole school (and country since there’s national media there too) that Ravi was her partner in all of this; she even invites him on stage to talk about his brother and how good he was.
Again, I mentioned in my first review how the book is about creating monsters and trying to fit people into specific narratives that make us (the world at large) feel better. With Andie Bell’s murder, the town was so ready to not bad mouth the beautiful, perfect daughter that they all forgot that Andie was human. She was a bully, blackmailer, cheater, a drug dealer, plus she was struggling with self-esteem issues and a father who verbally abused her saying that her only worth was how she looked. Andie Bell was a complicated person with multitudes just like all humans are. The town was so ready to accept that Andie was this golden girl and that Sal murdered her because it fit the “usual” narrative of the “outsider” committing the crime.
Pippa ends her presentation with a speech about monsters and the town’s culpability that I believe sum up the novel well: “Though this story does have its monsters, I’ve found that it is not one that can be so easily divided into the good and the bad. In the end, this was a story about people and their different shades of desperation, crashing up against each other…There’s one final player in this story, Fairview, and it’s us. Collectively, we turned a beautiful life into the myth of a monster. We turned a family home into a ghost home. And from now on we must do better.”
I omitted part of the quote to not give away who was involved because it was such a twist that people should read on their own!
Leave a Reply