Goodbye, Perfect (written by one of my fav authors!) | book review

Hola Lexicans! Today I've got a really exciting post as it's a book review of Goodbye, Perfect which is by one of my all-time favourite authors Sara Barnard! As soon as I found out Sara was releasing another YA book I was very, very excited (although kind of sad because it's not coming out until Feb next year and at the time it was only right at beginning of August so a good few months until the release) so when a copy of Goodbye, Perfect arrived in the post from the fabulous Bea at Pan Macmillan (thanks Bea!) I was majorly happy and I finished it in no time.* So obviously since I really loved it, I thought I'd share my opinions over here.**

*By the way if you haven't noticed I may be a teeny weeny bit of a fangirl when it comes to Sara and her books.
**Because that's what book bloggers do

Goodbye, Perfect is all about the strength of friendship, even when you're going through a tough time and about loyalty even when it involves lying to the police. It follows Eden, a tough girl, who would be labelled a 'bad influence' by many despite not really being one, who was faced with a struggle when her closest friend Bonnie ran off completely unexpected with her secret boyfriend whom Eden knew nothing about except his name Jack. For as long as they'd been friends, Eden and Bonnie had told each other everything and stuck together so naturally everyone assumed Eden would know everything about the runaway, why, what they were doing, whereabouts but instead Eden didn't know the ins and outs of Bonnie's plan except the address, which honouring their friendship, she would never give away even when the police got involved..

credits

This book, particularly like one of other Sara's (amazing aha!) YA books Beautiful Broken Things, is centred around friendship. Since Bonnie ran away right at the beginning of the book we don't really meet her much except through phone calls, texts and Eden's flashbacks which I thought at first was interesting as I thought that 'you couldn't have a friendship that was really developed in a book where you barely meet half the friendship' but actually Sara managed to do this really well and I thought the friendship was an accurate representation of a lot of friendships.

On the subject of accurate representation, that's one of the things that I really love about Sara's writing. In Goodbye, Perfect, Eden had a messy, complicated and most importantly realistic family life which wasn't as pristine and polished as I find many families are. The plot wasn't based around families at all but Sara still included them and whilst I'm not adopted like Eden was, I could definitely see a lot of the relationships in families portrayed in my everyday life (with friends, bloggers or myself).

The only slight thing I would say about this book was that I found the very beginning and very ending not very BAM (if you know what I mean..?!) As in, particularly the end, I was hoping it would be a little more of a plot twist (but then again that does really kind of contradict my point above as otherwise it wouldn't have been as realistic so I did kind of love it that way too GAH)

Overall I loved this book (like I did with Beautiful Broken Things (see my review here) and A Quiet Kind Of Thunder (see my review here)) and when it comes out in Feb I would 1000000% recommend that if YA contemporary is your thing (or even if it isn't - step out your comfort zone mate) that you go buy this!

Also huge thanks once again to Bea for sending me a proof of this book, it was very exciting (the only annoying thing about proofs is I'll have to buy this book in stores anyway knowing me as I need all 3 of the covers together - I did that with BBT as well, I bought it on the Kindle, loved it and then decided I needed a physical copy of it too to go with my AQKOT!!)

So yah I'll be back soon with another post! Love you all:)
Xxx