Book Review: Good Me Bad Me

Disturbing, compelling, twisted, unsettling, uneasy, upsetting . . . oh, there are many words you could use for Good Me Bad Me, Ali Land’s debut novel. Fifteen-year-old Milly now lives with a foster family, where the father – big-hearted (yet also professionally-fascinated) psychologist Mike – has a tendency to take in troubled strays like her. His wife Saskia has mentally checked out of it all, spending her time either high or having sex with her yoga instructor, and their daughter Phoebe – the same age as Milly – is outraged by and resentful of it all.

What Phoebe doesn’t know – what Milly’s been warned only Mike and a handful of others can know – is that the latest lurid criminal case splashed all over the tabloids is centred on Milly’s mother. Which is to say, Milly’s mother, and the nine children she’s accused of murdering.

As the trial draws nearer, with the ongoing countdown acting as a ticking clock, Milly knows she’ll have to testify. She’s already given evidence, helped destroy her mother’s life – but she still feels her mother’s influence within her. She yearns to be reassured that she’s nothing like her mother. That she won’t grow up to be a psychopath.

Her often-fragmented narration is heart-wrenching and unsettling at the same time. This is not a girl who thinks about the world in a ‘normal’ way. This is a girl who’s been both horribly abused by her mother and misses her terribly, who is both glad to be free and horribly guilty about what she’s done. And as she enacts tiny moments of revenge on Phoebe and her friends, who insist on making her life hell, we begin to wonder whether this fear of turning out like her mother might be a reasonable one.

Is it possible to ever recover from such a traumatic childhood? Well, yes, if you’re writing a handbook for those working in the mental health sector, but when it’s a psychological thriller, no. No it most certainly is not. If you enjoy your dark-twisted-screwed-up women, this certainly fits the bill.