I hate that we are halfway through October and I am just posting about this now, but I am very excited because I have started a buddy read club with my best friend! We started with something YA, I think more for nostalgic reasons (we met when the first Divergent movie came out which yes, was 10 years ago! Oh my..), and it was so much fun!
So, for September we chose A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson.
Although I very much doubt it, if you haven’t heard about this book, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is the first volume in the YA mystery thriller trilogy written by Holly Jackson, and also her debut novel. The book was published in 2019 and is followed-up by Good Girl, Bad Blood published in 2020 and As Good As Dead published in 2021; in 2021 there was also a novella that was published acting like a prequel for the series, Kill Joy.
To say this series is popular is an understatement. I don’t think there is one person that hasn’t either heard about it, read it, or just seen the book cover somewhere – from online shops to libraries and bookshops, Youtube reviews and so on. This is one of the main reasons why I was fairly excited to read it. I don’t know what it was that made this series SO popular, maybe part of the success happened because two out of the three volumes came out in a pandemic and people were literally locked indoors with not much to do. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the book is not bad, but it’s not so great in the sense that you would expect to see it everywhere either.
And before I dive into more of my feelings and thoughts about the book and the story, I just wanted to point out something that I found outrageous. This book has been published in many countries, including the USA. The American publisher decided it was a good idea to change the location from the story from UK to USA, more exactly they’ve changed Little Kilton to somewhere in Connecticut. Since when do we have the liberty to alter what the author wrote in the first place? I was so confused by this and I’ve never heard of this kind of change before. I don’t think this should be a thing with any book or form of art, just leave it as it was written or created.
So Angela, my buddy read friend, read the book in Romanian. Her book, published by Corint under the Leda Edge imprint, was translated from the US version! So when she hit play on the BBC adaptation she was utterly confused as to why everything was happening in the UK instead of the US. And I was confused by her confusion! 😂
Pip is the main character. She is a nerd, a very good girl, the best student and friend. She decides to work on a school project by approaching a very sensitive topic: a crime that happened in her little town 5 years prior. She goes on to investigate what happened, gather interviews and evidence, trying to show that the person who was thought to have commited the crime was actually innocent.
The problem is that Pip is around 16-17 years old, she is a highschool student with what I consider a bit too much courage. What starts as interesting and cool, transforms slowly in things that Pip does or says to which you can only be reacting with “a 16 year old wouldn’t have done or said that in real life, not in the world we live in” – even if you are smart or courageous, there are things that happen throughout the story where anybody (but especially a 16 year old) would’ve stopped, talked to their parents or called the police. Or all of the above, if I’m being honest.
Apart from that unrealistic nature of the story, the book in itself is very cool, multimedia inserts throughout, guessing and suspecting this person and that person until the very end when you are surprised by the outcome. I don’t know why althought the person who did it was surprising to me, I was not impressed by the ending, like it wasn’t this huge “omg I can’t believe it” moment which you get with very good thrillers. 
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is a decent YA mystery thriller and, I also said this to Angela while we were discussing the book, I think for a younger audience this would be such a cool story and an even cooler book. I’m sure I would’ve been more hyped about it if I was to have read it in my teens. However, it it a decent read and if the 2nd or 3rd book ever come my way I won’t say no. 🙂
Now, for the BBC adaptation.. This was somewhat less than decent. It’s rushed and there are so many things that have been changed from the book to the scrip that you start to get annoyed, because none of them were good changes.
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, written by Poppy Cogan and directed by Tom Vaughan and Dolly Wells, was released a few months ago by the BBC. It stars Emma Myers as Pip Fitz-Amobi and I didn’t think Emma was not British until Google told me otherwise. She stars next to Zain Iqbal (who plays Ravi Singh) and althought they are both cute, there is no ‘wow factor’ to them or the rest of the cast. I personally think the series was created solely due to the hype surrounding the books and that’s about it. You can very easily just read the book and move onto the next volume as I really think the series does not add any value to the story or the universe created by Holly Jackson. However, if you’re curious enough or just want to watch a light mystery thriller, then you might find all 6 episodes on Netflix or BBC iPlayer (depending on where you live).
Sometimes bad things just happen.
Trailer:
