'Celia wakes up in a house that’s supposed to be hers. There’s a little girl who claims to be her daughter and a man who claims to be her husband, but Celia knows this family—and this life—is not hers…
'Allie is supposed to be on a fun weekend trip—but then her friend’s boyfriend unexpectedly invites the group to a remote cabin in the woods. No one else believes Allie, but she is sure that something about this trip is very, very wrong…
'Maggie just wants to be home with her daughter, but she’s in a dangerous situation and she doesn’t know who put her there or why. She’ll have to fight with everything she has to survive…
'Three women. Three stories. Only one way out. This captivating novel will keep readers guessing until the very end.'
Whenever a Christina Henry book is announced I get a little bit excited. Her stories tend to be ones that grab me pretty quickly, books that I find hard to put down. Her writing has helped me through reading slumps, and have kept me up all night. And Good Girls Don't Die is no exception. And whilst I've always found the blurbs for her stories to be intriguing, this is the one that grabbed me the most. Three different women, in three vastly different scenarios, all fighting for their lives.
Good Girls Don't Die is split into three distinct parts. The first part follows Celia, a married mother who runs an Italian restaurant in a small town. She goes running with her friend, drinks white wine and watches trash TV, and is your stereotypical well of business mum. But the main problem is that Celia can't remember her family. She finds herself standing in her kitchen, her daughter pestering her for her lunch, but has no idea who she is. She doesn't recognise her husband, and her home feels alien to her.
Not sure what to do, she tries to fake it through the day, pretending to be fine and normal, hoping that her memories come back to her. She settles into her routine at her restaurant, chats with her staff, and even gets into an argument with her neighbour over the restaurant bins. It's all normal, mundane, and quaint. But then Celia discovers a dead body, and she looks to be suspect number one in the case. And it all feels familiar to her, to the cosy mystery stories that she knows she's read before, even though her house has no books in it.
It's then that she starts to realise that none of her life feels right, that she has faint memories of living in the city, that she wasn't married, and that this town isn't her home at all. With her memories a jumble, she sets out to see if she can solve the murder, as well as find out some answers to her own mystery. But nothing could prepare her for the truth.
The second segment of the book focuses on Allie, a college girl who's supposed to be going on a beach trip with her girl friends to celebrate her birthday. But when her two friends invite their boyfriends along it starts to sour her mood. When she falls asleep in the car she's shocked to wake up to find that they're at a cabin in the middle of the woods. It looks like one of the guys decided this would be better, and completely derailed her plans.
Trying to make the best of things, dealing with two friends who hardly seem to care that they ruined her weekend, and with a guy that Allie is sure wants to do something creepy to her, things take a turn when someone begins knocking on the cabin walls in the middle of the night. Soon things begin to escalate, and the group of teens realise they're not alone in the woods. Worse still, their cabin has no locks on any of the doors or windows.
With things spiralling out of control, Allie has to try and get everyone to listen to her, knowing that if they don't work together the unseen assailant will pick them off one by one. After all, this is just like the slasher horror films that Allie loves to watch.
After this we meet Maggie, who wakes up to find herself and nine other women locked into a shipping container. The group of women are told that not only have they been taken prisoner, but a loved one for each of them has too. They have twelve hours in which to make their way through a maze filled with traps and challenges, or they and their loved ones will die. To prove their point, the masked men who take them kill one of them, showing the group that this really is a game of life and death.
Maggie sets out with a group of other women to try and make it to the end, desperate to get out so that she and her daughter are safe. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the people who put them into the maze don't want to make things easy for them, and the group are beset by deadly traps and twisted challenges that start to whittle their numbers down. Can Maggie use her love of YA post apocalypse fiction to help them through the maze and to freedom.
Early on into the book it becomes clear that Celia's life is a fake, that she's living through some twisted game-like scenario. Not long after reaching the cabin in the woods Allie begins to notice that things don't seem right, that stuff is too new, too odd to make much sense. And Maggie knows that she's in a twisted game of death. The big mystery of the book is how do these things all connect, if they do?
Christina Henry does something truly brilliant with this book, she creates three separate, distinct narratives in wildly different tones, each of which could be a book unto itself. The cosy mystery genre of Celia's story is easy to recognise, and Henry ticks off a number of tropes and stereotypes well, indicating that she could easily pivot to this genre of storytelling; and it's one that I'd love to see her take on. The forest slasher scenario feels lifted from a cheap 80's movie, and Allie knowing the tropes of those movies and trying actively to work against script is a great twist on the genre and feels wonderfully subversive. And Maggie's portion feels like every Hunger Games and Maze Runner type book, just with a group of adults rather than the teen protagonists you're used to seeing.
Henry manages to make each segment feel like it's part of these genres without it ever feeling like a send-up of them. You get the flavours of these different types of stories, with its own mystery undercurrent going through each of them, that comes together to make this really neat amalgam. Because Celia's segment comes first you have no idea what to expect, and don't know what her memory loss means. By the time you come to Allie's story, however, we've been given enough of a peek behind the curtain to begin to suspect trickery from page one, and it makes the beats of her story take on a different tone and makes you pay much more attention. And come Maggie's parts you know for certain that things are wrong, but hers is the part of the books that seems least like it's trying to convince you that stuff is normal, and so this knowledge doesn't help much. What you learn in each part and how it helps to shape the narrative and tone of the next is as much a part of the story as each individual segment, and Henry does a fantastic job at weaving it all together.
As well as a creative and compelling narrative Good Girls Don't Die has some fantastic lead characters. The main women in the book are clever, strong willed people who will do what it takes to survive, but without ever being cruel to do so. A prime example is Maggie, who could try to get through the maze on her own, but chooses to go slower to help others, to keep as many people alive as she can. The characters in the book are strong, capable, passionate women, and that is a part of the story. Without going into much, sexism and misogyny is a big part of the book, and a central theme come the end, and so showcasing these kind of women as being the targets for such hate makes sense. Weak, pathetic men hate women who know themselves, who don't back down to sexism, who aren't afraid to assert themselves. This book might be a fun mystery story that plays with genre expectations, but it's also got an important message about being a woman, and dealing with bigoted men.
I've had something of a reading slump the last few months. Despite having read more books this year than ever, most of them have been graphic novels, and I've been finding prose hard to engage with. I read Good Girls Don't Die in two days. It made me desperate to read one more chapter before I fell asleep, and come the end I just wanted more. I feel like this book was not only a wonderful, amazing read in itself, but that it also helped reignite my reading, and for that I'll love it even more.
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