The Good Girl by Mary Kubica

I’m going to start by saying I did not like this book. The Good Girl is about a girl named Mia who goes to a bar one night to meet her boyfriend for dinner. Her boyfriend never shows up, so she ends up leaving with another man named Colin. Little does she know, Colin is not the nice man she thought he was. He was paid to kidnap her, but instead of bringing her to his boss, he drives her to a remote cabin in the cold outskirts of Wisconsin.

The Good Girl was told in three points of view over two time periods. We hear from Mia in the past (“before”) and present (“after”), her mother Eve before and after, and the deceptive Gabe before and after. I’m finding that I don’t like books that do this as much as I do having one POV. I think it can be done right, but more often than not, when it’s done in a thriller it takes away from the suspense and mystery, because you already know what each character is doing and thinking. If the story was told just from Eve or Gabe’s point of view, there would have been a lot more opportunities for reveals and surprises.

Almost everything in this book fell flat for me. Everything was really predictable, I didn’t connect to any of the characters, and I didn’t care what happened to them. The blurb on the book led me to believe that there would be a lot of suspense in this book, and to me, there was none. I honestly was bored throughout most of it, and there were a number of times I almost walked away from it and marked it as DNF. Additionally, I’ve see other reviewers mentioning that they felt it was fast-paced, and I didn’t feel the same way. It could be because I was so bored, but I felt like the story dragged on, and considering the book was only ~350 pages, that’s not a great thing.

Another thing I did like (that had no impact on my review) was that a lot of the story was set in Chicago. I live in Chicago, so I loved being able to understand references and locations!

Anyway, I can’t say I’d recommend this book, though the book has decent reviews, so I’m clearly in the minority here. I have a few other books by Mary Kubica on my list, and I’ll have to do some more research to decide if I still want to read them. The one thing I will give her is that she’s a fine writer. I had no issue with her writing, just issue with the way it was executed (POVs) and the storyline.