Good Me, Bad Me by Ali Land

Whilst the premise of the book was good and gave me something to think about - how much impact does your behaviour have on your children and how damaged can your actions make them? - I found these book to be merely "okay".

Told from the perspective of Annie/Milly it has a wonderfully chatty style but I became completely irritated with some of the attempts at using teenage speech patterns; in several places throughout the book she sounds like Yoda - much of this was due to punctuation issues however and could have been fixed by a good editor (maybe they are the editor's fault in the first place - but I digress).  This then served to yank me out of the story and then other things begin to strike you.

There is little to no characterisation beyond a simple one dimension for any of the other people in the book.  Annie/Milly sees herself in many different lights (almost split personality in some cases) and yet Phoebe is little more than a caricature of a self-obsessed teenage girl; there is some attempt to rectify this later in the book but it feels forced and stilted and really doesn't lift the character at all.  Mike is a complete doormat and the drug-addicted Foster Mother is so bland I cannot even recall her name.

The plotting is adequate but I found the attempt at drawing out suspense over the terrible crimes Annie's mother (Ruth Thompson in case you missed her one name check in the book) had committed to feel contrived, especially the cross examination of Annie in the Court Room.  What saved this book, in my opinion, were Annie's internal dialogues with her mother and her constant description of her mother's memory being reptilian.

The ending felt designed to shock and serves no other purpose than that, no resolutions are reached and it left a bitter taste in the mouth.  I didn't expect a happy ending but what I got was a disastrous ending that had no hope for redemption in it.

**Review originally published January 15th, 2018**