A Good Person by Kirsten King: book review
Thank you to Putnam for providing an advanced copy for review purposes.
Lillian's boyfriend was stabbed to death near a bar close to his apartment. He'd just broken up with her, and she'd put a hex on him because her marketing job was doing a campaign for the Wellness Witch, and the witch's page had hexes, and that seemed like a good idea because Lillian and her best friend, Jamie, were really, really drunk. It seemed like less of a good idea when Jamie checked the Boston Globe and found out he was actually dead. The chaotic novel follows Lillian through the police investigation as she grapples with the end of the relationship, Henry's death, her culpability, and her place in the wider world.
The book is entertaining and compulsively readable. The sentences flow by effortlessly, and I always found myself sneaking in an extra chapter or two before I put the book down because it was just so easy to read. I also have to commend King for her very strategic pop culture references that confirmed the book was, in fact, written for me (specific Bravo things, an obscure Sally Rooney reference, niche internet memes). The book makes a great case for using the subtle ephemera of our present world to ground a story. Not everything needs to be timeless, and King uses these references to connect her sometimes thorny character to the reader.
This thorniness leads to my sticking point with the novel. There's a thinness that pervades where it feels like depth is evaded instead of plunged into. Where we could really interrogate Lillian as a character, a joke is made instead, or Lillian takes the most extreme, delusional path of thinking possible which obfuscates and takes opportunities with it. She gets close to feeling like a deeply broke, recognizable human, but then King feels the need to push the last ten inches of absurdity that take Lillian from an "unlikeable" character to a truly unfeeling, scary narcissist that is legitimately dangerous. This is frustrating because King has so much there that the heightening wasn't needed. The novel opens with Lillian in a tenuous spot that pulled at my heart strings. She's fallen for this guy who sucks, but it's the longest relationship she's ever had. She's a little delusional about it, and he takes full advantage of her, knowing that her self esteem is low enough that he can talk her into doing whatever he wants. After not listening to her clear "no" during sex, he breaks up with her. Turns out, he has a girlfriend already. He was never going to love Lillian, no matter what she did. This isn't the first guy who's done this to her, and a part of her knows that he won't be the last. This is enough to make anyone understandably mildly unhinged in the way Lillian is through most of the book. Most people don't act on the less flattering impulses that arise in their mind, but most people also aren't the main characters of novels. I genuinely felt for Lillian, and she reads as deeply human until King throws in random, unnecessary details that make her cartoonishly the villain and harder to root for. These things invalidated the depth that was being created around this person who makes a lot of bad, harmful choices but does them from a deep, deep place of hurt that began in childhood and was perpetuated into adulthood. It kind of turns Lillian into the butt of the joke in a way that I don't think was the author's intention and was just a side effect of trying to heighten the story but still had that effect on the reader nonetheless.
To the somewhat hollow attempts to raise the tension, I felt like the book could've concluded at the 80% mark. I thought it was concluding, actually, and thought maybe there was just a lot of back matter that was included that threw off the Kindle percentage. Nope. There's gotta be one more twist, one more forgotten drunken Ambien haze to deliver a final plot turn. Again, this just felt like not trusting the story that was there—about the damage the world does to us and the damage we do to the world and finding healing in unexpected places. While Lillian has a rough road with Henry's actual girlfriend, who gets to play the publicly grieving widow, they do end up being important to one another. The final big twist, while more in-line with the marketing than honestly the rest of the book is, sort of invalidates this growth and connection earned. It almost felt like a gotcha to me that dampened the effect of the really important topics and themes that are threaded through the novel. It's hard to say if I simply wanted the book to be something it's not or if the author turned away from the true core of the novel. All the threads are so clearly there, and I think it would've been well served as a much more delicate story. I think, probably, it's my fault that I saw too much human behind a character that most people, from the reviews I've seen online, are happy to write off as an irredeemable, born-this-way sociopath and move on.
All of this isn't to say that the book isn't well crafted or worth reading. Clearly, to have all of these feelings, I grew deeply invested in Lillian and her journey. It's a fast read with a fun voice and plenty of looming questions. Would definitely recommend it to people who like some mystery or suspense elements but also are very sensitive and need to still be able to sleep at night.
Overall: 4
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