A Good Idea by Cristina Moracho Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“Loss is a strange alchemy that changes you forever, remakes you into someone, something else... It's the price of admission for this whole human experience.”- A Good Idea, Cristina Moracho

Can the right kind of boy get away with killing the wrong kind of girl?

Fin and Betty’s close friendship survived Fin’s ninth-grade move from their coastal Maine town to Manhattan. Calls, letters, and summer visits continued to bind them together, and in the fall of their senior year, they both applied to NYU, planning to reunite for good as roommates.

Then Betty disappears. Her ex-boyfriend Calder admits to drowning her, but his confession is thrown out, and soon the entire town believes he was coerced and Betty has simply run away. Fin knows the truth, and she returns to Williston for one final summer, determined to get justice for her friend, even if it means putting her loved ones—and herself—at risk.

But Williston is a town full of secrets, where a delicate framework holds everything together, and Fin is not the only one with an agenda. How much is she willing to damage to get her revenge and learn the truth about Betty’s disappearance, which is more complicated than she ever imagined—and infinitely more devastating?

I have two hopes for thrillers. One, that they're good, and two, if they aren't good, that they're so bad they're good. I'm talking either Tana French fantastic or Natasha Preston terrible, basically. Typically, though, I find most YA thrillers are bad, but not so bad they make it to fun bad. Most of them have annoying as all hell heroines with no detective skills who like to make things worst and still end up figuring out who did it, cliched settings, and oddly useless grown-ups. Enter A Good Idea, by Cristina Moracho.

Before we begin, a warning: the creepy old bathtub is totally coverbait. It's in the book for maybe a half a scene if that. 

I consider myself kind of an expert in small and rural New England towns. Probably because I am from a small and rural New England town in an area of small and rural New England towns. When most people think of New England they think of the seaside or skiing or those ridiculously wealthy old money WASPs, not really realizing that a lot of New England is in fact small towns with tons of farmland and lots of space between houses. Our towns have charming names and a relatively large town has a people count in the 10000s. I graduated from a school of 4-500, and my class size was considered large at 170 kids. We were actually considered to be on the larger side in the surrounding area because we had our own high school instead of going in with one or two other nearby towns. My point is, I know small towns. I also know that the town in this book is easily the most stereotypical town ever.

Seriously, why are all small and rural towns in YA lit the same? They all have the same tropes- corrupt mayor/sheriff, bigoted people, etc. This town reminded me of the one in It Takes One, which put a bad taste in my mouth. I don't think Moracho has ever been to a New England small town before. Or if she has, she just thinks that this portrayal is the only way to sell books. 

And the writing. Everything about it was just Moracho trying so hard to write a Southern Gothic, Harper Lee kind of story, a twisted rural noir with a main character the teens can relate to and get behind. Did not work for me. Finley's narration grated on me hard and so much just felt like it was there because it's trendy now. Again, creepy small town, "sarcastic" main character, setting the book in the 90s, drug use, excessive swearing, vintage clothing... I could go on and on. Moracho was also trying super hard to get a creepy, David Lynch/Twin Peaks vibe but it just didn't work, because nothing was ever actually creepy. The bits about the ghosts and the "curse" that Betty's death apparently inflicted on the town just felt underdeveloped and ultimately unsuccessful. I've been more creeped out by stories I wrote when I was six than I have been of this book. Also, her written characterization of Finley does not match up with how Finley is actually portrayed. We are told she is sarcastic and she analyzes people like she analyzes movies, always interested in the inner workings of their minds. With the exception of a few lukewarm one-liners, we see no evidence of either of the two in Finley's actual narrative.

And yes, there is an excessive amount of drug use, tons of (underage) drinking, and swearing. This is passed off as no big deal. That didn't feel particularly realistic to me. I mean, I never swear in front of my parents, even now, because it doesn't seem really appropriate. Also, Finley's dad seems perfectly fine with his daughter getting wasted and fucked by people she barely knows. Kind of odd, if you ask me. I'm no prude (well, depending on who you ask), but damn girl, you need serious rehab. 

But hands down the part of this book that just pushed this book over to hate for me was the main character. Are you seeing a trend? If I hate the main character and I know the author is trying to write a likable character, I can't stand the book. Finley is just so annoying and narrow-minded and hypocritical. She doesn't listen to reason at all whatsoever. She gets so many really great and reasonable points or scenarios as to what actually happened to Betty brought up by the adults she talks to and because they don't fit in her perfect little small-minded view of what happened to Betty she throws them out immediately. She couldn't ever actually admit that she didn't actually know Betty as well as everyone else in the town did. She makes so many claims- Betty would never overdose, Betty would never kill herself- and yet she has no idea that she doesn't really know the chick she calls her best friend at all. 

I'll touch more on her hypocrisy in the spoilers, but I just wanted to say that honestly I can't believe that she ever could have lived in this town. She just seemed like just because she lived in New York for four years she's so much more sophisticated than those, how did she put it, "provincial hicks" in her home town. And honestly? Speaking from someone who loves New York City dearly, YA novels are way too enamoured of the City. Take my sister, for instance. Now, ever since she was little, she's been a city girl. Lived for our trips to the City every couple of months or so, always told us that someday she was going to live there, counted down the months until she graduated and went to college in New York. She was home every weekend, homesick for New England and our small town. Sure, she loves New York, but she never looked down upon where she was from as being uncultured or hill-billy, unlike little miss Finley here.

I mean, the other characters aren't really great either. I really did not like Serena, and did not enjoy their relationship at all. Serena reminded me way too much of Eden from Paperweight. The difference here is that with Paperweight, Eden was throughout the whole novel portrayed as an extremely negative influence on Stevie, getting her into drugs, breaking apart her relationship with her brother, etc. all for the sake of drama. Serena, through the entire novel, is considered a good love interest, despite the fact that she's giving Finley highly addictive painkillers (how the hell is Finley never addicted to them, by the way?) and dragging her along in this insane and idiotic plan for revenge. They feed off of each other, and it's never shown as even a potentially bad thing until the last few chapters. Even towards the end, Finley brushes off any warnings she gets about how manipulative and not good Serena is. 

I think the only interesting character in this whole book is Silas. He's like a cross between Dr Jacoby and Leo, if you can imagine that. In fact, the entire novel is kind of like Moracho's trying to write a Twin Peaks. I mean, think about it. Finley's kind of like Donna, and maybe Maddy, too. I get major Laura vibes from Betty (oddly enough, I also get Audrey vibes). Serena's a strange gender-bent mix of James and Bobby. I guess Emily's meant to be a gender-bent Sheriff Truman. The setting is a small woodsy town. But the thing is, I was never that invested in the melodrama of the teenagers' storyline in Twin Peaks. I was always more interested in what Cooper and Truman were doing. And not to mention, I feel like Donna, James, and Maddy weren't so close-minded that they just decided who did it and then tried to make all the evidence fit into that neat little box. They genuinely just wanted to know who killed their friend. Sure, they did do stupid shit like break into people's houses and in one case inadvertently cause a death (I'm still mad at Donna for that), but this book reads like they all figured that, I don't know, Bobby is solely responsible for the death of Laura and then tried their damnedest to incriminate him. 

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW

This is one of the strangest mystery novels I think I ever read. It annoyed me how sure Finley was of Calder, and it was odd how it's not really a whodunnit. All I was thinking was that I'd really hate to have Finley on my jury. She's so deadset that Calder killed her that she can't believe any other points of view. And she's a fucking hypocrite because you just know that if Caroline had died from the drugs Owen gave her, then she would be screaming from the rooftops that Caroline wanted to die because she took the drugs herself and of course Owen wasn't responsible at all, but even though Betty literally begged Calder to kill her, Calder's still a murderer. And honestly, Betty's a fucking selfish bitch for even making him do it. If she wanted to die that much, she should have, I don't know, overdosed or walked into the ocean a la Edna Pontellier and spared the man she supposedly loved from having to deal with the guilt of giving her what she wanted most in the world. I don't know. What I do know is that this book just pissed me off.

MAJOR SPOILER SECTION OVER

So do I recommend this book? I don't know. I'm sure someone else would like this book way more than I did. I mean, I did think it was an interesting idea, but I couldn't stand the relationship in the book or the main character. Not to mention, we all know who killed her. I think the real mystery in this novel is why this book even exists in the first place.

4 out of 10