Review: The Good Girl
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 23, 2014
Eleni and Gabriel are both young adults left in this world with scars and broken hearts.  Eleni had parents who were more interested in using drugs than being parents; she vowed to never be like them.  Instead she was going to college and working at a bar but she was dependent on alcohol. She finds other releases from her daily emotional pain and self-hatred, through sex with strangers and getting tattoos.  Spending every second of her day trying to avoid and run from her emotions she found that life just wasn’t worth living at times.Gabriel had two parents who loved him but they were killed in a car accident. With a body covered in scars from the same accident, he found a way to cover them with tattoos, but nothing could cover the emotional scars the still lived with.  He acknowledged that he was a monster who desired to dominate someone and the visions he had of taking the life out of a body consumed him at times. While Eleni intrigues him, he also at the same time hates her for her drinking habits.  One night after following her, he kidnaps her under the disguise of “rescuing” her from a drunken man.This is where the story will begin to come together or fall apart depending on the reader.  After a slow beginning of repeating over and over about how they felt and what they had been through, we see how they interact together.  Needless to say it was rough and harsh in the beginning.  While I won’t go into the details of their journey because I feel it is something you need to read and feel for yourself, I will say the motives for why they did what they did by the end was interesting.  I still can’t wrap my brain around how fast it happened but they both become the cure for each other, giving them each the courage to stop using the excuses and crutches that they depended on in the past. They both came full circle to find a reason for living again.I was highly anticipating this book.  I have read the individual published works by both authors and I was anxious to see how they would blend their creative abilities together to create one book. Instead of feeling like I could highly recommend this book I have to say I was disappointed.  While each author has a distinct writing style, I don’t believe that their styles were meant to be combined for a joint project.  I think that even if they had the same vision of how this story was supposed to play out, both lost the intensity that we have grown to know in their styles and books. In their defense, it could come down to readers expectations, especially if you are familiar with both authors work.The characters both irritated and confused me by their views of life in general and of each other.  What sounded like a great plot and backgrounds that could have carried this story far lost that opportunity in the repeating internal dialogue, jumps in emotions and desires that I felt lacked a bridge for understanding and choices that left me trying to wrap my brain around the events and understand what had just happened.  To have two characters brought together by anger, lust and disturbing emotional issues, who later ended up with a total understanding between them in the end has been done before, what left me scratching my head with this one was the rapid pace in which it happened and the lack of connection that I felt they had with each other for the majority of the book. While it has been done in other books, I don’t feel it was accomplished well in this book.