Christina Henry has plied her storytelling trade in multiple genres from urban fantasy, to story re-imaginings to horror. Whereas her previous novels largely fell into a singular genre, Good Girls Don’t Die is a genre mash-up, it is a novel from the point of view of three female protagonists, one in a cozy mystery, one in a slasher film, and a dystopian teen thriller.
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.
We first meet Celia when she wakes up to a husband she doesn’t know and a teenaged girl she can’t remember birthing. She goes through the motions, picking up cues from the people around her and what she sees around her – her husband is a lawyer and she owns an Italian Family restaurant. Celia can’t shake the feeling that what she’s experiencing, the life she woke up to is not her own. When an old woman’s dead body is found in the dumpster by her restaurant, she can’t go through the motions any longer.
Allie, our second protagonist, is spending a weekend with her friends celebrating her birthday. Except not quite the way she wanted, her friend’s boyfriend switched up the plans and they find themselves at a remote cabin in the woods.
Maggie is thrust into a very Hunger Games-like scenario where she must compete with about a dozen other women to escape a dangerous maze. It’s okay, the characters call out their situation as being like The Hunger Games. These women are told a loved one will die if they don’t compete so they have no choice.
The book is broken into four sections, one for each woman and a fourth which is the finale. Prefacing each chapter is a chat exchange between a couple of friends hinting at the story unfolding. Henry plays a casual game with the reader, not hiding too much behind a curtain of what is going on in each of the three women’s predicament. She also infuses the story and characters with a heavy dose of genre savvy. This all tells me Christna Henry respects her readers (and her characters!) and doesn’t want to string them along. I especially appreciated the shout out to David Fincher’s The Game, a 1997 film starring Michael Douglas I recall seeing the film in the theaters, thoroughly enjoying it and that the film kept me on the edge of my seat. Good Girls Don’t Die had the same effect on me.
These three women have a lot in common, they are smart, unrelenting, and fierce. Once these women realize their individual situations are contrived, they are simply Not Having It. They aren’t going to accept what the chauvinistic, self-important men try to foist upon them. It is an empowering element of the book, how these three women endure all the shit (for lack of a better word) thrown at them in this novel and continue to persevere.
The conclusion was mostly rewarding and a little bit of a surprise, initially. As it played out more, I found it to be a logical statement that put a bow on the themes Henry was infusing into the narrative up until that point. The primary antagonist was a little cartoonish and shallow. However, despite that cartoonish element, the antagonist is that much scarier because of how plausible it is given the level of toxic masculinity in today’s culture. It worked, but I would have liked just a bit more depth to the villain.
Bottom line, I enjoyed the hell out of this novel, Henry pulled me into the story immediately. I found myself feeling a great deal of sympathy and empathy for each woman’s plight and rooting for them to break away from the jerks trying to hold them down. The little worlds she created for each woman’s scenario was fun and had enough detail to keep the story going and worked extremely well to provide the characters with more depth. The plotting was extremely brisk and well-handled. I was so enrapt in the novel I nearly finished it one sitting!
Good Girls Don’t Die only makes me want to continue mining Christina Henry’s backlist because after having read three books she’s written, she’s a writer I’ve come to trust.
Recommended
© 2023 Rob H. Bedford
Paperback | November 2023
https://www.christinahenry.net/
Sneak Peek: https://www.christinahenry.net/?cat=73
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Berkley
