Good Me, Bad Me
I found myself shaking as I read this book.
I should have known, my boyfriend is away, my new house is big and full still with shadows I don’t understand the workings of. I don’t do well with scary things, especially in the dark. Good Me, Bad Me, the debut thriller by former mental health nurse Ali Land crept up under my skin leaving my palms clammy and my heart thumping hard and fast against my rib cage.
On the simplest level this is a book about a fifteen, soon to be sixteen, year old girl whose mother is a serial killer and a pedophile. It is written from the first person, limited perspective of Milly (formerly Annie) in the months that follow her decision to hand her mother into the police. The book is constantly swelling towards the trial, where Milly will be the main witness called upon by the prosecution to testify against her mother.
When I first opened Good Me, Bad Me, I wondered if the writing style would throw me from the book. Milly has such a distinct voice and the way she narrates this tale is almost stream of consciousness. Many of the sentences are short, often only single words to punctuate an idea. The voices and thoughts Milly struggles with, those of her mother and her repressed desires, interweave with the narrative and become almost seperate characters in and of themselves. It unsettled me to begin with, the jarring sentences combined with being privy to such intimate thoughts, but soon I found myself hearing her voice in my head as if her and I were one in the same.
I read this book in less than a day, the majority in a single sitting after everyone else was in bed. As it got later and later I realised I wouldn’t be able to stop reading until it was over, until I had an ending sitting comfortably in my lap. You see this story was so chilling, Milly so easy to empathise with, the sensation in my chest that something was ever-so-slightly off so compelling, that I knew that if I tried to turn off a light before finishing this novel the darkness would fill with monsters.
And so it was that I came to finish Good Me, Bad Me at just past 3am. I slept with the light on anyway.
