MK's Reviews > Good Girl

Thank you to Netgalley for providing an ARC of this book.

I really don’t want hating “All This Could Be Different” by Sarah Thankam Mathews to be a core part of my identity here, but I simply could not help but notice the many clichéd parallels between that book and this one (Mathews even blurbs this book, go figure): a sullen narrator whose big secret is that she’s hiding a core aspect of her identity from her friends (in this case, her Afghani background*), parents whose entire narrative revolves around their diasporic despair after leaving their home country, a shitty white addict partner with whom she engages in degrading sex and later, light DV, vague mumblings about Marxist philosophy, flat depictions of people of color who exist as window dressings to the narrator, and annoying white friends who are placed on a pedestal and simultaneously treated as complex and nuanced while being impossible to tell apart.

There are so many other narrative cliches that exist in this book - the use of photography and musings about the creative process to lend color to an otherwise unpleasant narrator, getting found out by a family member about her dalliances with a white guy in a supremely far-fetched manner, falling in love with another girl as a teenager, the Dead Parent of it all, flattened toxic family members whose conservative attitudes exist in opposition to the narrator’s unruliness, ending the book with the narrator getting into college and leaving her city and therefore opting out of a satisfying conclusion, a fucking hate crime at the climax that fizzles out to nothing. Please, I’m so tired!

Two stars for some inspired turns of phrases.

*side note: the narrator kept mentioning over and over again how she’d tell people she’s Israeli when they would ask where she’s from. I get this is to show her shame over being perceived as an other, but this goes mostly unquestioned and just feels gross to read when Israel is committing a genocide in front of our eyes.