The Good Girl by Fiona Neill

The Good Girl by Fiona Neill
Buy The Good Girl by Fiona Neill at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: General Fiction
Reviewer: Zoe Page
Summary: A private act becoming public has repercussions beyond a teenage couple’s wildest fears in this book of love, limits and damage limitation.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 480	Date: April 2015
Publisher: Michael Joseph
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 978-0718181277
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In my German A Level we had to discuss Die Jugend von heute (the youth of today) which is a bit hard for a 16 year old to do, what with being one of them. Maybe if I’d not sat the exam a year early, I’d have passed that stage and would have been able to comment as a wizened adult rather than a yuuuuf'.

Romy is a sixth former who is unremarkable. A good student from a professional family, her aspiration is to become a doctor, and it’s an achievable, rather than lofty goal. Or it was. Because a video has surfaced and it shows Romy doing something that is hardly going to help her medical school application. Or her future career. Or her future life, full stop. For Ailsa, the head teacher, she has the double whammy of trying to keep the school out of the headlines and protect her child who is now at the centre of the controversy. And it’s clearly all the neighbours’ fault.

This is a modern book for modern day, and the plot wouldn’t have worked anywhere near as well 10 or 15 years ago. But in 2015 it’s easy to believe that (a) Romy would do what she did, and (b) that it would spread like wildfire. Because the problem isn’t (just) that a video was made, but that it went viral, like a plague with no cure.

It’s a vaguely familiar story, and immediately reminded me of Good Girls by Laura Ruby. I’m a little surprised they went with the title they did because there are a lot of similarities between the two stories, even without this, such as teenage girls being caught doing things that Good Girls don’t (or don’t do on camera, anyway). The main difference, though, is that Ruby’s book is aimed at teenagers, and Neill’s is written for their parents. And it’s scary.

I’ve read Neill’s newspaper columns and previous books but this one moved away from the comedy element into a more serious, at times emotional voice. Told alternatively through Romy’s and Ailsa’s eyes, we see both sides of the story, the horrific aftermath and the (flawed) logic that caused it. The trademark Neill observations are still there, though, and the inclusion of the Fairports provides a quirky, comic relief while Ailsa’s father doesn’t add much to the story, except for making her seem more human in between her severe headmistressly episodes.

I enjoyed this book even without a big reveal – we start with the end and work backwards so you know what’s coming well before you see it happen. That doesn’t mean there aren’t surprises, though, and Ben’s final secret in particular made me double take.

I would highly recommend this book though it may make scary reading for parental types. Thanks go to the publishers for supplying this book.

The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy by Fiona Neill is an earlier work that remains a firm fave, though the parenting woes are somewhat more lighthearted.

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You can read more book reviews or buy The Good Girl by Fiona Neill at Amazon.com.

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