Review: Good Girls Beware...
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 28, 2013
Good Girls Beware......That was....well, it was like staring at a car accident.You know you should look away, it's just too gruesome to look at, but you just can't tear your eyes away.'I didn't drink. I didn't smoke either, and I didn't make a habit of hanging out at bonfires with a group of strangers. But tonite was different. Any place was better than home. Even this. I pulled back the tab and brought the can to my lips...I felt myself relax. My stomach was heavy, like I'd just swallowed a bowling ball, but I felt lighter than I had in ages. I tried to remember the sinking depression that had threatened to drown me only an hour earlier, but it had disappeared. I smiled for no reason, a wide grin that stretched across my face.'And this is where the after school special-nightmare begins.So many bad decisions were flying around in here, it made me glad I don't have a teenaged daughter. I mean, Aidan was like the poster-child for everything you should avoid in a guy wrapped up in a hott-seductive package. He is NOT your romance book bad-boy, he was just bad. Period. He knew exactly what he was doing, took complete advantage of Megan's innocence & vulnerability, but she was just too young, naive & depressed to see his attention for what it really was.Her parents are recently divorced. Dad has remarried a pretty young thing & is too wrapped up in his new life to pay attention to what is going on. Mom is holed up in her room buried under her depression & booze completely ignoring everything around her. Left to her own devices & desperately seeking an escape from the pain in her life, she finds it in Aidan's sweet charm. Parties, alcohol, drugs, it all comes with him & his crowd, providing the escape she craves in a not-so-healthy way. The scene where she loses her virginity was just....awful. She loses herself in Aidan & all that comes with him, pulls away from her friends, falls behind in school, and no one seems to notice or care. It was disturbing & heartbreaking.By the time her aunt steps in, she's already well on the path of destruction. With the help of her aunt & friends she finally starts to see the wrong turn her life has taken. But coming back from it all is easier said than done, especially when Aidan puts up an unexpected fight. I would recommend this book to everyone- mothers & daughters, separate or together, it doesn't matter. Just read. This. Book. So very real & utterly heartbreaking. Props to the author for going where most won't. And though the epilogue doesn't wrap everything up in a pretty little bow, this is the one instance where I'm totally okay with that. It stayed true to the rest of the book & I understood that. However, that doesn't mean I wouldn't like to know how Megan is doing ;)