The Good Goodbye - Cara Buckley

Gut Instinct Rating - 2

Characters - 2

Believability for type and topics - 2

Similarity to other books - 5

Writing Style - 1

Excitement Factor - 2

Story Line - 1.5

Title Relevance - 4

Dust Jacket Art - 3

To read or not to read? Don't waste your time.

Movie? None.

Goodreads users gave this book a 3.94. I think it was more deserving of a 2.50.

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Published on January 12, 2016.

Pages: 348

Publishing Company: Ballantine Books.

Number of books by author: 4

Genre: Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, Contemporary

This book simply sucked. Overall, the book was boring, repetitive, and quite frankly, too jumpy to follow unless you were taking notes. (Okay, so that last part is a bit dramatic, but..., so was this book.) It was all shock-and-ah!, which I didn't feel was done well.

The characters were so similar. You have the two main characters - cousins, their parents (one mom from one side, and one dad from the other; and then the remaining two parents) are all alike, the boys the like - the same. Their friends, not the same, but the friends are all identical to the character they're friends with. There was a huge lack of ingenuity when it came to character identities. On top of that, they weren't likeable. None of them! I mean, I felt something for Natalie (one of the mom's), but then she went and fucked that up by being a dumbass. (Side note: if you hate cheating, this book will piss you off. A lot.) It's no wonder no one in this book communicates with one another, and that everyone has trust issues. The whole book is a corrupt mini-society!! Okay, so let's move past the fact that everyone feels the same and that I basically despised all of them. I couldn't feel anything for any of them, which is the entire point. If an author writes a book, and the characters mean nothing - they don't anger you, make you feel sorry for them, they don't give you joy or laughter, what is the fucking point?

I mean honestly, it was just tragic that this book could've been worth something, and the entire time, I just wanted to skip through it to get to the end. The writing style was just atrocious. I know, I know, I mark down a book 99% of the time if they jump between character point of views. But because every character sounds the same, if you don't flip back to the front of the chapter, you could think Natalie is Rory and Rory is Arden. But then within the chapter, we can travel from present day, to when we're 4, to a year ago, back to when we're 7, and then present day again. And none of it done smoothly makes for a mind fuck. It's so hard to track a story when you're trying to (a) figure out which character is which and then (b) try to figure out what time period we're talking about or reminiscing on!

The book was incredibly boring. It isn't until the last few chapters (and I mean, 2-3) that you find out what happens. So before all that, you find out some family drama, learn about how close Arden and Rory supposedly were (it's not really ever clear when, why, or where the divide took place, or if they ever actually liked one another), and then we talk about the numerous affairs people have outside of their "current" relationships. Then we find out what happened in the fire. There were a few moments in between that were "oooh!" worthy, but really, nothing happened in the entire book because there was just so much reminiscing.

The story itself could've been good. Maybe nothing more than a 3.5, 4 on a good day because the ending wasn't great and I'm not really sure anyone could've taken anything from the story except for don't play with paint thinner, and stop being so dramatic about everything. The story jumped between current day, last year, and then a wide variety of years before that, when it could have focused more on what was happening. There was a way this story could've been told, from multiple perspectives, and with lots of history behind it, and still been successful. But the way this was done, was a book-ruiner.

The title is fine, but, I mean, honestly... you can't even tell if it's a relieving statement, or a bitter statement when it's made in the book, so maybe something more clear should've been made (or maybe it should've been written better?). The artwork is fine as well, but in the book, the girls are supposedly identical and could easily be mistaken for one another, but the front shows two girls of very different heights, with different characteristics, and they're staring out a window, which doesn't really make a lot of sense. This book as a whole is just all over the place.