I really did not like this book, I felt it was all a bit silly and unlikely. The story touches on friendship and forbidden romance but I could not connect with the story or the characters.

Was a fan of Barnard's previous novel but this just didn't have as much of an impact on me. Wasn't anything particularly wrong or bad, but didn't find myself wanting to pick it up.

I received an Advance Reader Copy from the publisher. This in no way impacted on my view.

For Eden McKinley, she is expecting the Saturday before starting her GCSE exams to be normal. Her and best friend, Bonnie, have plans to head off to Cheltenham for the day to relax, and as she's getting ready, she is completely shocked when the police, and Bonnie's mam, turn up on her doorstep and reveal that Bonnie has run away, and with her form tutor, Mr Cohn. To say Eden is blindsided would be an understatement - she knew that Bonnie had been 'seeing' a mystery guy named Jack, but never could have guessed that would be a teacher. But when Bonnie starts contacting her from an unknown number, and revealing more about where her and Mr Cohn are, can Eden stay loyal to her oldest friend, or will she do the right thing and tell the truth?

I feel really weird saying I enjoyed this book. I've been on a bit of a Barnard binge at the minute, and this is the third of her books I've read in the last week. Obviously, the content of the book looks at a truly abhorrent and vile crime, and as a teacher myself, I felt sick seeing how Mr Cohn had groomed Bonnie into believing they were in love and running away. I also couldn't believe how much Eden kept hidden, until the very end. Yes, there is loyalty to your friend, but when it's a crime, and and that friend is in danger - even if she believes she's on an adventure - you should want to help get her back to safety. Eden was a character who was difficult to like. She had had a difficult life, in and out of the foster care, with an abusive and neglectful mother, but had been adopted by the McKinley's since she was 8/9, and had a loving family around her, including sister Daisy, and step-sister Valerie. The way Eden treated Valerie, though, I hated. All Valerie wanted was to be the best big sister she could to Eden, ever since they met, but Eden always pushed her away. I mean, Valerie was in the final year of uni, about to start her exams, and still came home to be with Eden after it was revealed Bonnie had fled. Eden just wouldn't either contemplate the idea of being kind to Valerie, even when Valerie dropped everything further to drive them to Glasgow to try and find Bonnie. I loved the way that the whole situation with Bonnie and Mr Cohn wasn't glamourised, or treated like something normal. It was always shown as abhorrent, with only Bonnie being the one to think it was normal. For Bonnie, I felt sorry for her. She'd always been told she was brilliant, and clever, and it seemed like she had the world on her shoulders when it came to exam results, and she was vulnerable and Mr Cohn used and abused his position of power. She wanted to feel loved, and cared about for her - not for her grades - and, unfortunately, this was when Mr Cohn pounced. All in all, a really thought provoking, and important book.

I love all of Sara Banards stories. This was one that definitely didn’t disappoint. It was different to the others which I really liked - I was really hoping that her best friend would come back.
I feel like the book did touch on some important topics, especially how this is still happening in real life.

Found this one really interesting. About friendship, the definition of love and family, about secrets and academic pressure.

I absolutely loved both Beautiful Broken Things and A Quiet Kind of Thunder, but Goodbye, Perfect surpassed my expectations. I’ve read a LOT of YA books focusing on student/teacher relationships (I don’t know why, I had a bit of a thing about them at one point) but this one was the first one I’ve read which has really done it right. From exploring the worried people left at home to investigating exactly how something like this can happen, Sara Barnard leaves no stone unturned, and she once again nails the authentic teen voice through Eden. I’m so glad that she won the YA Book Prize with this one, and I can’t wait to read Fierce Fragile Hearts and be blown away by that one too.

A beautiful book by a beautiful author - I loved her other books and this was just as amazing! I absolutely adored it!

Sara Barnard has quickly become one of those authors whose books I will instantly buy for myself and recommend to my customers. She never disappoints. I know that when I pick up one of her novels I will be immersed in a realistic world filled with difficult choices and relatable characters. Goodbye, Perfect deals with friendship and family in a unique way - making the reader carefully consider what choices they would make in Eden's place. I recommend this book for anyone who's ever had a friend make an unpredictable choice, anyone who's ever had to stand up to a friend for their own good, or anyone who's ever fallen for the wrong person.

I love Sara Barnard's books. I enjoyed reading Beautiful Broken Things (WHICH THERE IS GOING TO BE A SEQUEL OF!!), I absolutely love reading A Quiet Kind of Thunder, so when Goodbye, Perfect was released, and I found out that Sara Barnard was going to be at YALC, I jumped at the chance to start reading this contemporary novel,

Eden McKinley knows she can’t count on much in this world, but she can depend on Bonnie, her solid, steady, straight-A best friend. So it’s a bit of a surprise when Bonnie runs away with the boyfriend Eden knows nothing about five days before the start of their GCSEs. Especially when the police arrive on her doorstep and Eden finds out that the boyfriend is actually their music teacher, Mr Cohn.

Sworn to secrecy and bound by loyalty, only Eden knows Bonnie’s location, and that’s the way it has to stay. There’s no way she’s betraying her best friend. Not even when she’s faced with police questioning, suspicious parents and her own growing doubts.

As the days pass and things begin to unravel, Eden is forced to question everything she thought she knew about the world, her best friend and herself.

After reading the blurb, I was a bit apprehensive when going into this book. Student/teacher relationships are a massive taboo in literature, especially when those student/teacher relationships are happening in secondary school. But I was interested to see how Barnard tackled this subject.

I think that Barnard writing this book from the POV of Eden and not Bonnie was the best way to write this book. I reckon that if the book was written from Bonnie's perspective, then it would become a bit boring, but then it wouldn't tackle the issues as much as it did. It was also interesting to see the relationship between Eden and Bonnie, and how Eden knew what Bonnie was doing was wrong, but she also didn't want to ruin the trust that Bonnie had put in her. I can 100% relate to how Eden was feeling. There was a point in secondary school, where I had to hide so many secrets for my best friend at the time. And even though I knew that she should probably tell her parents what was going on, I decided to keep her secrets because her friendship meant so much to me. So yes, I understand how Eden felt.





“People talk about friendship like it's only about shared loves, but it's not. It's also about finding the same things annoying and getting excited about the same silly, irrelevant things. It's the person you can share a joke with, sure. But it's also the person you can subtly roll your eyes at when someone else is talking too loudly. The person who makes the fun things better and the boring things more bearable.”

― Sara Barnard, Goodbye, Perfect





By writing by Eden's perspective, Barnard allows us to consider the weight of the situation and makes us see that there is more than one perspective that we need to consider. It made us see Bonnie's perspectives, the parents' perspective... The way that grooming is explored throughout this book is clever because you can see how much Bonnie 'loves' Mr. Cohn, and that she would do anything for him, and for a bit, you're drawn into their relationship and you start to believe that they actually do love each other... But then you're reminded that actually, she's 15. It's illegal. It's grooming. This book IS a contemporary, but it's definitely not a light read. Barnard analyses the problems in a very real and honest way.

I think the only reason why I didn't give this book 5 stars, was because Goodbye, Perfect wasn't as good as Barnard's previous books. I definitely preferred A Quiet Kind of Thunder, so I think that's why I've given it 3.5.

If you know something about someone or something that could be bad or potentially harmful, and it doesn't personally affect you, that doesn't mean you shouldn't say something or think of it as the serious situation that it is. Please tell someone. Because that potentially dangerous 'thing' that is happening could be life-threatening. So please please please tell someone.

Disclaimer: this book was sent to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Sara Barnard is probably one of my favourite authors and while this book didn't blow me away quite as much as Beautiful, Broken Things or A Quiet Kind of Thunder, I still really liked it. It was really interesting to see the narrative of a teacher-student relationship from the perspective of a best friend. While obviously her choice to be loyal to her friend and keep her location a secret was obviously not the right one, I can understand how hard it can be to know what to do in this situation.

I did feel that maybe it would have been good to see more of Bonnie before she ran away. We were left listening to Eden talk about what Bonnie was like before and how her friend seemed to be completely different to the way she thought she was, but we only really met the Bonnie who had been groomed, the Bonnie who thought she was in love and so we only had Eden's thoughts on the subject.

I think the thing that made this book for me though was the relationships between Eden and her family. Being adopted and forming relationships with a new family is always an interesting topic to read about. It was really nice to see such a positive relationship between her and her adoptive parents and the contrast between the relationship with her biological sister and her adoptive sister. It was good to see a fresh take on the adoption subject.

Sara Barnard has now published 3 novels and I have read them all and I will to continue to read whatever she publishes. This has to be my least favourite of the three, it’s not a bad book by any means it’s just I have been spoilt by her other books ‘Beautiful Broken Things and ‘A Quiet Kind of Thunder’.

I knew what I was letting myself in for when I started reading this book, it’s about student – teacher relationship I know this will put a lot of readers off but I had only read one other book that had this subject matter and it was only a small part whereas this is the main plot of the story.

Eden’s best friend Bonnie has vanished, everything seemed to be fine between the girls, there were no signs that her friend was unhappy at all, if she was Bonnie would have told her. Except it seems that their friendship was not all it was made out to be. Bonnie, disappeared and ran away with her music teacher! Eden had no idea, Bonnie mentioned a boyfriend but Eden never met him or saw a picture of him so she thought he was made up. No-one believes Eden didn’t know about this, she gets interrogated by everyone, the police, Bonnie’s mum and even other students.

Eden faces a lot of internal conflict as she knows where Bonnie is but as a best friend what would you do? She has so many questions and doesn’t understand the relationship that is going on.

This book was a bit slow going and long-winded for a 300 page book. It has a lot of things going on in the background from the story we have the relationship between Valerie (her adoptive sister) that was very tense and fraught but developed over time when she started to confide in her. We also had Eden’s boyfriend Connor, he was an overall nice boy who was the main carer for his mother. Connor was the stability that Eden needed and their relationship did not take over the focus of the main story at hand.

The great thing about Sara Barnard’s story telling is that she does it respectively, this book has no way shape or form romanticized student-teacher relationships but it does make you aware that it still happens and how when being groomed, you can become delusional and think you are in love.

There was also text messages and IM’s which is being incorporated more and more into YA literature, this is social norm of our world today and definitely breaks up any monotony and hopefully entices people to read.

I rated this 3/5 stars

Thanks for reading

“Holy fucking shitballs Bonnie”
Okay, I stole Sara’s quote to open this review, but honestly, there is no better description of this book than that. Seriously. I screamed swears at this book so many times I lost count. It hit all my feeling buttons, and some I didn’t even know I had. I was basically Father Jack in the corner minus the drink cuddling a book (if you don’t get that reference, just move on, it wasn’t that funny anyway…). I refused to cook my family’s tea whilst I read the last few pages. It was that gripping.
Goodbye, Perfect is the story of Eden and Bonnie, best friends since forever. Bonnie is ‘the sensible one’: she’s the kind of the girl who decides to sample alcohol for the first time in the safety of Eden’s room treating it like a science experiment. She’s the girl at school who is “over-prepared to the point of ridicule”, and Eden is just …not. Eden is adopted, she doesn’t feel completely secure in her family, she still remembers a lot about her mum, and she is very cautious about who she opens up to. She can be feisty, sarcastic and scathing. She is witty, often at the wrong moments, and at times she had me howling with laughter. She seems outwardly confident but second-guesses herself a lot. She is used to putting up a front with everyone. Except Bonnie.
First and foremost, Goodbye, Perfect is a story about teenage friendship. Sara is the Queen of writing authentic teenage friendships. She captures what it is to have a best friend in your teens beautifully: the ferocity, the all-consuming nature of them, the feeling that you will share all the things all of the time. In this novel, Sara shows us what it feels like to have that feeling tested. There is a lot of emphasis in this story on what it means to Eden to be a best friend. Eden would do anything for Bonnie, even lie to the police. She sees Bonnie’s running away with Mr Cohn as a betrayal of their trust, not because she went, or because she went with a teacher, but because she didn’t tell her. Despite this, she still believes she must keep Bonnie’s secret. I loved how mortally offended she got every time someone accused her of lying or knowing more than she did, even though she does. There are huge gaps to what Eden does know, and she justifies her actions this way and by telling herself that she’s keeping her best friend’s confidence.
“She asked me to keep quiet and to trust her, and so I have to do that. That’s what being a friend is”
“Even when they’re completely screwing up?”
“Especially when.”
Goodbye, Perfect, perfectly depicts the heart-breaking reality of discovering that perhaps you don’t know your best friend as well as you think you did, and this realisation breaks Eden in a new way. Of all the things in her life, her friendship with Bonnie was the one thing Eden could rely on. Eden is cautious in her relationships, she doesn’t open up easily, but she has given herself to Bonnie, and the realisation that their friendship might not have meant as much to Bonnie is difficult for Eden to take. I really did feel for Eden. Bonnie has suddenly become someone Eden doesn’t fully understand. She’s about to blow off her GCSEs, the exams she has spent her whole life panicking about, because she’s "in love". This is not Eden’s Bonnie. Eden says, “It doesn’t make any sense at all”, and she is hurt when Bonnie suggests it’s as though they’ve both changed places because:
“it’s not like we’ve switched places at all – I’m just the same as I was last week. It’s more like my best friend has disappeared and been replaced by a total stranger.”
Eden doesn’t really know how to react to the news. She does what she thinks Bonnie would want, at one point deciding to “help” by providing a more favourable picture of Bonnie to be used in the media. She believes that she knows Bonnie better than anyone, and this is what Bonnie would want, but (and as a mum I can understand this), Bonnie’s mum does not find this helpful. Eden takes a lot of the blame for Bonnie’s decision. Bonnie’s mother lashes out and directs her anger at Eden. She is the one who is still here, and Bonnie’s mum finds it easier to blame her then she does to accept she doesn’t know her daughter. The adults around her all act very differently and this highlights the age difference: the way that adults think about the situation is a stark contrast to the way Eden and Bonnie see it. They might think they’re adults, but they’re not. There is a poignant conversation between Eden and Bob about this which was well-handled. Bob is the calm parent figure, and he (unlike the other adults) treats Eden like someone old enough to understand what is happening, but perhaps not able to grasp the nuances of it. Eden sees that her friend is in love and that she is happy; Bob has to point out that there are issues of power and authority at play because of Mr Cohn’s position.
Mr Cohn is just creepy. Let’s be real. There are so many red flags here, I could start a parade. For starters he’s her teacher, and I think the parent in me really couldn’t get my head around this. Mr Cohn is a “cool” teacher – everyone at school has had a crush on him. He’s THAT teacher. I loved that Eden was so surprised about this relationship: that she thought Mr Cohn wasn’t the type of teacher to do this (subtly busting the myth that there is a particular type), and that her response to Bonnie saying, “you don’t know him” was “I’m not supposed to know him. He’s my teacher”. I did find myself having some mixed feelings that I am not proud of, because obviously this situation is all the kinds of wrong. A teacher and pupil romance is not okay. But on the other hand, it seemed clear that Bonnie absolutely knew what she was doing when she ran away with Mr Cohn. She may not have understood all the implications, but she is a thinker, and her actions throughout suggest she absolutely knew that what she was doing was serious, and that it wasn’t good.
Eden’s own relationship with Connor is a constant reminder of how wrong Bonnie’s relationship with Mr Cohn is. Connor and Eden act like teens in a relationship, they don’t have to hide from everyone, they are stable, they’ve thought about their progress as a couple, they talk to each other, Connor encourages Eden and supports her, and I thought it was important that the book showed this, so we didn’t get swept up in the “love story” of Bonnie and Mr Cohn.
Goodbye, Perfect is narrated in first-person by Eden. She gives the story a very authentic teen voice, and this viewpoint allows us to go through all of the emotions alongside Eden. We start off, like Eden, wondering what the actual fuck Bonnie is playing at, but by the end, we start to see what led to Bonnie’s actions. The story is told through texts, extracts from letters, factoids about the characters and, my personal favourite, “Conversations That Took on a Different Meaning after Bonnie Disappeared” gives perspective on Bonnie, which allow us to reflect on Bonnie’s thoughts and feelings leading up to her running away.
There is a lot more to this story than friendship. It’s also a story about family and acceptance. There is a fabulous subplot of Eden and her adoptive sister Valerie’s relationship. We see Eden push Valerie away constantly, and Valerie seems hurt by this. I did want to yell at Eden a bit (okay, a lot) at some of these moments. I could understand her feelings of not fitting in, being adopted can’t be easy, but at the same time, it seemed so obvious that Valerie just wanted to have a relationship with Eden. When the two are forced to spend time together on a long car journey (with a very awkward Connor in the backseat), they have the chance to confront this issue and really get to the bottom of how the other is feeling. Initially, like Eden, I found Valerie quite irritating, but as the story went on I grew to love her. It also gave us chance to see more of Eden’s feelings around her adoption: part of the reason she pushes Valerie away is because she cannot believe that Valerie wanted her for a sister. Foster care and adoption are woven seamlessly into the narrative. It never feels like we’re being given information, but it does shed a light on Eden’s perspective, which many will share, of life in foster care. I loved how Eden’s mother wasn’t portrayed as being abusive or terrible, just a mother who couldn’t give her daughters what they needed or deserved. This is something not often reflected in novels, so it made a refreshing change to read.
I have loved Sara’s work since the moment I picked up A Quiet Kind of Thunder and vowed to read everything else she has ever written, and I think Goodbye, Perfect might just be her best work yet.
Read this. You won’t find a more beautifully heart-breaking tale of friendship or sisterhood anywhere.

Sara Barnard has already established herself as a powerful writer and voice in contemporary YA with her previous books, Beautiful Broken Things and A Quiet Kind of Thunder, and with Goodbye Perfect we see her go from strength to strength.

In Goodbye, Perfect, Eden is the one that people might not be too surprised to hear she has run away with someone. She's an adopted teenager with a difficult childhood and has already had a 'rebel phase.' Sara Barnard subverts a possible trope by having the strait-laced best friend Bonnie as the runaway and Eden left behind to figure out how her friend could have kept this from her, and leaving Eden with the brunt of the emotional blame for the situation.

Sara Barnard sticks closely to Eden as she interacts with a small and well-developed set of characters that make up her life. A picture of Eden's life is built up through well-judged flashback scenes with Bonnie, as well as straight-up profiles of the main players. Bonnie is absent throughout the bulk of the immediate plot, but the friendship between the girls is explored in these flashbacks and in their occasional communication.

There is a lot of quality interaction between Eden and her biological sister, Daisy (potty-mouthed but super cute), her adopted parents Carolyn (an absolute saint of  patience) and Bob (the calming and wise presence) and Eden's adopted sister Valerie (wants to be the good big sister but Eden finds it hard to connect).

Carolyn and Valerie emerge separately as really intriguing characters. Carolyn is a brilliant adopted mother trying to keep a handle on Eden and wanting her to live as free a life as possible at the same time. Valerie grows into the plot, seemingly inconsequential and there to make up the numbers at the start, but pivotal to Eden's arc by the end. Eden's boyfriend remains more of a peripheral character, seemingly written deliberately sans drama, subverting another YA trope.

So the main plot then is ultimately the relationship between Eden and Bonnie. Eden finds out that even though your best friend might seem like the model of studiousness and diligence, you may not always know what's going on beneath the surface. It's a fascinating exploration of the value of strong relationships and the validity of relationships which change dramatically, where one party is holding a secret from another. There's a lot of other wider issues at play, which become apparent with the scandalous nature of Bonnie's runaway, that of running away with a teacher.

I blitzed through Goodbye, Perfect in a way that I can only do with good quality YA. It comes across as real and readable in that way that seems effortless, but which takes a huge amount of craft to achieve. What more could you want from a book but to feel empathy for the main character, to be able to relate to them and to be absorbed with the story?

I've actually put off writing a review for this book a little while due to the fact that I didn't love this and I 100% wanted too, but to be honest I just couldn't get behind the actions of our main character Eden. I could understand it at first she didn't want to believe it and the shock of it all but as the story started to progress and more things came to light I just wanted to scream at her to stop bloody covering for her best friend who could be in serious danger!

I loved all the other side characters especially Eden's adoptive family and I did like Eden I just didn't agree with her decisions and while I loved getting to know Valerie a bit better I really didn't like the trip to Scotland mostly because by that point I had given up on Eden doing the right thing and just handing over her phone to get mum.

What I will say is the writing was fantastic it just read so quick and easy and I would definitely dive into more Sara Bernard.

Thank you to the publishers for the review copy via netgalley

I've read both of Sara Barnard's works and loved them, but despite knowing I would probably fall for this book I kept finding myself putting it off. I knew it's main focus would be a teacher-student relationship, which for me, was something I didn't really want to read about. Eventually, after a bad reading slump, I decided to dive right in and boy do I regret not reading this sooner. It. Was. Amazing.

Barnard did a great job with the character's, and despite the fact that I was desperate for her to do the right thing, I really liked Eden! She acknowledged her mistakes and was a little naive, but a fiercely loyal friend, loving sister, and her relationship with Connor was ADORABLE to read. I also loved the McKinleys! Carolyn and Bob were the most awesome adoptive parents EVER, and Valerie really grew on me as the book progressed. I really liked that Barnard addressed a whole bunch of issues in this book OTHER than the obvious - pressure on teenagers, exams and curriculum, responsibility, the power of journalism, underage sex, adoption & fostering, family relationships, young carers, WOW. So much goodness here, I love it!

It's true, the plot pretty much got stuck in one place. Eden spends a vast majority of the book weighing up the meaty decision of whether to tell anyone what she knows and while for some this obviously slows the pace down, I really got into it! I could see EVERYONE's POV, and I felt that Barnard did it in order to handle the issue with the care it deserves rather than having it there as an overriding shock factor plot ARC. It also made the explosive finale EVEN MORE action-packed to read. Also, this book gets an automatic thumbs up from me JUST because it's set in Kent, the county where I spent most of my life. I could 100% relate to the setting of this book, especially the school part. Amazing stuff, and I'm eagerly anticipating the third book!

Goodbye, Perfect follows the story of 15-year-old Eden whose life-long best friend Bonnie has suddenly runaway from home with her secret boyfriend. The most worrying thing is that Bonnie’s secret boyfriend turns out to be their music teacher Mr Cohn. Eden is secretly communicating with Bonnie and lying to the police and her parents in order to protect her best friend.

This book grabbed my attention as soon as Eden first got into contact with runaway Bonnie. These has been a few cases in recent years of pupils running away with their teacher and the news always intrigued me as to why both people had decided on the relationship and running away. I loved that this story wasn’t told from the perspective of the runaway Bonnie instead it is told from the perspective of Eden who is at home for the ordeal.

It was certainly different to read about a student/teacher relationship from the view of a 15-year-old high school student rather then from the media point of view. It was interesting to see a different side of the experience. I wanted Eden to do the right thing to help her friend all the way throughout the book. Eden is very loyal to bonnie and is always looking to make sure that Bonnie is her happiest. Eden is also very naive which is typical for a 15-year-old. When Bonnie claims that she is “in love” with Mr Cohn, Eden doesn’t even bat an eyelid. Eden also doesn’t seem to understand why Bonnie running away is such a huge problem that needs such a huge police investigation and media frenzy.

I really enjoyed the aspect that the media frenzy added to the narrative. It was nice to see what Eden thought about the media frenzy surrounding her best friend. Bonnie is very quickly labelled by the media as a “good” girl which makes Eden think. She believes that if she was in Bonnie’s position there would have been a more negative response to her running away.

I had never read a Sara Barnard book before picking up this book. I am certainly planning on picking up her other books thanks to reading this book. Her writing is extraordinary! I have heard so many good things about her other books and I will certainly be reading them now.

Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes a thrilling story that on the inside appears fictional but on the outside is very very real. This book is unputdownable and I cannot recommend it enough!

Thank you to Macmillan Children’s Books, My Kinda Books, Sara Barnard and Netgalley for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

One of the most complicated aspects of friendships surely has to be secret-keeping. When your BFF asks you to keep something secret, why would you question it? You’re a loyal, trustworthy best friend! But what if you started to question their motives for keeping it quiet? What if the secret was upsetting people? And what if, despite all her protests, you started to believe its was actually hurting your best friend too?

Eden was always meant to be the wild one, but when her dependable, sensible, straight-A best friend Bonnie runs away with a guy just days before the start of their GCSEs, the tables are turned. Eden is left wondering what it says about their friendship that she knew nothing about this supposed boyfriend until they were halfway across the country together. And as her family and the police pile on increasing pressure, she starts to question everything. Would it really be betrayal to tell them she knows where Bonnie is, or would it just be the quickest way of getting her home?

Sara Barnard is the master of writing friendship in all it’s complicated, glorious messiness. I enjoyed reading the story of a sensible, straight-A pupil, putting pressure on herself in the lead up to her GCSEs (something that felt all too familiar!), and exploring how easily it can all go wrong. Everyone assumes the high-achieving students are doing just fine, but what’s going on beneath their sensible, intelligent and hardworking exterior?

The grooming and teacher-student relationship in Goodbye, Perfect was sensitively handled. Seeing it through the eyes of Eden ensured it was never glamorised and we see the position it puts her in, having to decide how far she will go to ‘protect’ her friend’s secret and slowly learning what Bonnie’s relationship really is.

However, the shining light for me in this book was Eden’s long-term relationship with the lovely Connor (who really likes a cup of tea). It is so refreshing to have a romantic relationship in YA be a steading influence, rather than a source of conflict, upset and high-emotions. As in A Quiet Kind of Thunder, Sara writes a wonderful kind of quiet, loving teenage relationship that positively glows off the page.

Sara Barnard continues to prove herself as a great writer of complicated relationships, be it romantic, familial or between friends. This book looks at various ways we/others put pressure on ourselves as well as discusses whether we really know someone and can predict their behaviour, all within the main plot of a teacher/student relationship. Working in a school gave me an interesting perspective of the storyline, although it did also lead to noticing a couple of errors when it comes to exam procedure. A variety of identities are featured (adopted, young carer, dyslexic) and are handled well as the story develops. I enjoyed the book but it fell a little short of the author's previous release.

If you pick up a Sara Barnard book and you are expecting warm cuddles and fun friendship frolics then you have definitely selected the wrong author. Barnard’s work is gritty and realistic and it doesn’t patronise its target audience: young adults.

Goodbye, Perfect is a story that focuses on the difficult concept of loyalty. Being loyal is one of the hardest things to be especially when you know that being loyal and being right aren’t always the same thing. This is what protagonist Eden McKinley must come to terms with in Goodbye, Perfect. Eden’s best friend Bonnie is normally the more mature one of them both. She is the straight A student with the perfect academic and behavioural record. She is the chalk to Eden’s cheese. But when Bonnie does the unthinkable and runs away Eden is left to pick up the pieces and re-evaluate the meaning of friendship and what it means to be best friends.

Having read work by Sara Barnard before I can honestly say that she is one of the best writers at understanding and expressing the complexities of teenagers and perfectly navigates the mine field of friendships between teenage girls. Goodbye, Perfect is a must read.

Goodbye, Perfect by Sara Barnard is available now.

For more information regarding Sara Barnard (@saramegan) please visit www.sarabarnardofficial.com.

For more information regarding Pan Macmillan (@panmacmillan) please visit www.panmacmillan.com.

I absolutely loved this. Highlights a very serious issue. I loved that there were so many tough subjects addressed in this book but that packing so much in absolutely did not cause the story to suffer. With so many layers the story felt rich and authentic and I believe it captured the voice of a teenage girl perfectly. I will definitely be picking up more from this author.