Great debut thriller. Annie was an intriguing character, and building her into the general bitchiness of high school life was a stroke of genius. Having lived through years of abuse and murder, dealing with Queen Bee mean girls was just as hard work!

Even though I had guessed the two main twists, it didn't detract from what was a good story, well told.

I would like to thank Netgalley & Penguin UK for my ARC in exchange for a fair and honest review

Good Me Bad Me is a story about 15 year old Milly. Who's mother is a serial killer and her victims are young children. The book follows Milly as she starts living a new life with a new foster family. She encountering the horrors of being the new girl at school, being bullied by her foster sister as well as preparing for her mother imminent trial as the main witness.
I won't say too much more as I feel it may spoil the story which is a thoroughly gripping but at the same time highly disturbing. Thankfully, the author didn't go into much details with regards to the children's suffering. It is an excellent story, really well written, so I would wholeheartedly recommend.

Good Me Bad Me - Ali Land


I have a feeling this book is going to be HUGE this year. It's unnerving, uncomfortable & undeniably beautifully written.
Annie's mother is a serial killer. Annie is given a new name & a new identity - Milly. She must live with her secret & a new family until it is her time to testify.
Integrating within her foster family, torn loyalties to her birth mother and keeping her identity a secret makes for a tense and twisty backdrop for this story.
I won't lie, this book made me incredibly uncomfortable. I think anything where a chilling child killer plays a role is going to be difficult reading. I don't think there's a single character that I liked and sometimes that feels odd as a reader. I think we're so used to aligning with our heroes & rooting for the good guys. In Good Me Bad Me it's difficult to know exactly WHO the good guys are. This is credit to Ali Land's brilliant writing.

Annie/Milly is so creepy, but her perspective is unique, fascinating and keeps you gripped throughout.
This will be a big book in 2017. Four cwtches. Order your copy here.

I thought this was an excellent psychological thriller. I wasn't sure about it from the description, but it grabbed me from the start and never let me go.

The book is narrated by 15-year-old Mille, who, in the first couple of pages, finally turns her monstrously abusive and murderous mother in to the police. We get Millie's account of her fostering by a psychologist, his wife and daughter who is Millie's age and who give her a home in the lead-up to her mother's trial. The story emerges gradually and very skilfully and I wouldn't want to know much more than that before I began the book. There are a lot of familiar-sounding tropes here: damaged teenage girl, bitchy, bullying schoolmates, survivor guilt and so on, but Ali Land does it all so well that it felt fresh, and the story holds some significant surprises.

Millie's voice is excellently done, so that the whole thing is very readable and I was utterly gripped by it. I thought it was an exciting, intelligent read and I can recommend it very warmly.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Loved this book. Huge praise for Ali Land - Good Me Bad Me had me gripped from the very first page and left me with the biggest book hangover! Excellent!

A really powerful book about a child in a psychotic household, and her time while her mother is on trial. The book takes some unexpected turns and leaves you a little chilled.

I read this book in one sitting. It was fabulous! Have to admit, the book was a bit scary at times and you didn't see the ending coming - shocking!

Annie's mother is a serial killer. The only way she can make it stop is to hand her in to the police. But out of sight is not out of mind. As her mother's trial looms, the secrets of her past won't let Annie sleep, even with a new foster family and name - Milly. A fresh start. Now, surely, she can be whoever she wants to be. But Milly's mother is a serial killer. And blood is thicker than water. Good me, bad me. She is, after all, her mother's daughter.
This is one hell of a novel. I was compelled to keep reading until the early hours of the morning. The tension ratchets up as Millie/Annie gets closer to the time of her mother’s trial. But it’s not just that that Millie is battling with. It’s her upbringing and her genes that make her doubt herself, miss her mother while at the same time hating her. She feels guilty for not doing more sooner, if she had perhaps less children would have died. But she also realises that mother taught her lessons that she can now use to her advantage. By turns emotional and shocking, this really is a tour de force of a psychological novel. I loved the short, sharp writing style. In fact I loved everything about this novel. A fantastic read!

As a thriller fan nothing gets me going as much as reading or seeing something I haven’t read or seen before. Admittedly this can be quite a task for an author since thriller novels and films abound, with new ones coming out seemingly every day. So when I saw Good Me Bad Me I was immediately intrigued by the blurb which promised all the right things. And I’m very happy to say that Land did not disappoint. Good Me Bad Me is both a gripping read and a book that will make you think. Thanks to Michael Joseph and Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

‘But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.’
Carson McCullers (1917-1967)

This is the quote that starts the book and, in many ways, sets the tone. At the centre of this novel is the question of Annie/Milly’s heart and what is in it. The nature vs. nurture debate has spawned not only dozens of academic discussions but also a whole range of literature. Humanity is fascinated with whether it is, at the core, intrinsically good, or if there is an innate ‘bad me’ which is only waiting to come out. Philosophers such as John Locke have argued for the child being a ‘tabula rasa’, a clean slate, upon which external influences start acting from the moment of its birth. So was it the belief of Rousseau that warfare and aggression are learned, and not innate. We find traces of these arguments in novels such as Jane Eyre in which Lady Blanche speaks of children with ‘bad blood’. Even Harry Potter addresses this when Dudley’s aunt monologues about how ‘if there’s something wrong with the bitch, there is something wrong with the pup’. What makes the latter of the two examples fascinating, and relevant, is that they seem to argue for a combination between nature and nurture. There is something of ‘bad me’ that is simply in all of us, in our blood, yet nurture has a major role to play in bringing it out. This cross-section within the debate lies at the heart of Good Me Bad Me. It explores to what extent evil is something that works upon us or from within us, whether bad things that have happened to us can make us do bad things too, or whether we secretly wanted to do those bad things all along.

Good Me Bad Me is filled with women of all ages and most walks of life. Evil serial killers are usually played by men in films or TV shows, with the rare female killer appearing as an extra special, scary treat. Very often her crimes are either sexual or against children, and in the worst cases the two are combined. It is this fear of evil women which fascinates me and which Land also cleverly picks up on throughout Good Me Bad Me. There is an almost blind trust in women to be maternal and caring, to want to protect children and to not be aggressive or violent. It’s the Feminine Ideal which has somehow survived into the 21st century and still makes it hard for women to talk about things such as Post-Natal Depression, the desire to not have children or the aggressive traits in our own personalities. Because of this ideal, the thought of a woman who goes against all this has always been fascinating and is present in a lot of literary and cinematic tropes. She is in the Femme Fatale, in the Last Girl, in the Virgin/Whore dichotomy. Good Me Bad Me addresses some of the points that arise from this combined fear and fascination with evil women and does so through a varied cast of female characters. There are the teenage girls, violently obsessed with their own lives and almost negligently cruel to each other. There are the mothers who care too much or not enough, those for whom motherhood is a challenge but don’t dare admit it. There are the women and girls who use what they have to get what they want, and those who want and give, but never get.

Land’s world is not a pleasant one, but to a large extent it is a very honest one. It has become something of a trend to write about “complicated women”, but often these books lose all the nuance that is so crucial to them. Novels such as Gone Girl are simplified down to “the good housewife is actually a psycho, beware of all women” and are thereby crucially misunderstood. Naturally thrillers and crime novels are sensationalist in a sense, but they also address significant issues around how men and women are seen and see themselves. Good Me Bad Me strikes a very good balance between following the genre’s knack for the terrifying as well as giving some insight into the minds of the people it is serving up to the reader. Land throws in enough twists that both engender sympathy for all the characters, while also making a sword out of that sympathy. In the end Good Me Bad Me won’t tell you who is good and who is bad, it will give you enough material, however, to come to your own conclusions with your own justifications as to why.

Land’s writing throughout the novel is superb. First person narratives are always tricky and very often do not work. Not only does an author need to create a consistent voice for their narrator, that voice also has to change and develop throughout the story. In the case of thrillers or crime novels the extra task is added that the narrator on the one hand shouldn’t give too much away, but on the other hand also needs to reveal enough to keep the reader engaged. There is a very good reason as to why Good Me Bad Me had to be written in first person. Annie/Millie is the sole focus of this novel, it is her psyche, her mind, that is under the microscope, so to say. The way in which Land writes Millie, how she breaks up sentences, constructs thoughts and gives shape to internal processes is fascinating and really draws the reader into Millie’s mind. There is something fractured and hard, yet also vulnerable about the writing of the book which gives the reader a constant glimpse at what’s in Millie’s mind, even the things she herself would rather not know about.

I absolutely loved Good Me Bad Me. I raced through it, not only because I was desperate to know what would happen but also because Land gives you no choice but to hurdle along until the bitter end. I’d recommend this to fans of Psychological Thrillers and Crime Novels.

It has been a long time since I've been affected by a book the way that I have with Good Me Bad Me. I finished it last night on the way home from work but I've had to mull it over and have a good think about it before I could commit my thoughts to the screen. I really can't believe that this is Ali Land's debut novel, it packs an explosive punch and really gets under your skin.

Annie's mother is a nurse at a women's refuge. The caring profession. She is also a serial killer and abuser of children. Nine small boys have died at her hands in a room known as the playground. The only way out that Annie can see is to turn her over to the police. So she does.

Now known as Milly Barnes she is a fifteen year old starting a new life in Notting Hill with foster parents Mike and Saskia and their daughter, Phoebe. Mike is a psychologist helping Milly with the preparations for giving evidence for the prosecution at her mother's trial. Phoebe is less than welcoming and soon Milly finds herself in the middle of a full blown hate campaign fuelled by a jealous teen who doesn't want to share her father.

I can't begin to explain just how creepy this book is. Told from Milly's point of view most of the book is set in the present day with some flashbacks to the life that she led with her mother. In many ways it has a quality of the Criminal Minds television show in that it presents pure evil at a relatively safe distance. Repetition is a key part of the way that it reinforces stressful situations.

<strong>"Up twenty eight. Up another floor. The banister on the right." </strong>

Its a fairly innocuous phrase in itself but in context and as it is repeated it becomes a genuinely chilling mantra. About two thirds of the way through I had a good idea of what was going to happen in the end but I didn't even come close to the full horror.

Good Me Bad Me is going to be the book that will have people talking all year and I will be very surprised if it doesn't get a movie adaptation really soon. The book clubs are going to love all of the nature/nurture discussions they can have around this story!

Supplied by Net Galley and Michael Joseph in exchange for an honest review.

Uncomfortable? Yes. Disturbing? Yes. Brilliant? Yes!

Good Me, Bad Me is one of the best books I've read recently: I could barely put it down and when I did I couldn't stop thinking about it. I was hooked from page one and, although it took me to some very dark places, Milly's story was totally compelling. It isn't for the faint-hearted but if you want a clever, gripping psychological thriller, look no further. This will stay with me for a very long time and I look forward to reading more from Ali Land.

Huge thanks to NetGalley, Penguin UK - Michael Joseph and Ali Land for the opportunity to read this ARC.

A very good debut novel by Ali Land. An excellent psychological thriller about a teenage girl with a serial killer for a mother. Very well written, clever and chilling. An excellent character study of a troubled teenager who is easy to like but equally easy to loathe! Dark, fast paced and set to be a controversial book in 2017. I didn't see that ending coming! I would recommend this book. Many thanks to Net Galley for my copy. I reviewed on Goodreads and Amazon.

Good Me Bad Me by Ali Land is a story about Milly/Annie, a fifteen year old girl with a dark past. Milly’s mother is a serial killer just about to go on trial. The interesting/sad thing is that Milly had to be the one to turn her in. This makes her the key witness in her mother’s trial. While awaiting trial, Milly is placed in the Newton’s home where she meets her foster family, Mike, Saskia and their daughter, Phoebe. It soon becomes evident that Milly’s nightmares are far from over. Living with a serial killer as a mother was torturous but the nightmare continues as she adjusts to a new life and is also forced to answer questions about her own identity.

The story is narrated by Milly as undergoes a number of challenges. Settling in a new family and especially a new school is difficult. It is never easy being the new kid especially when others are not so accepting. Milly is also haunted by her mother and the victims of her crimes who she still hears and sees. In addition she is also conflicted by her feelings for her mother.

My feelings about Milly changed from chapter to chapter. I found myself empathizing with her especially as she struggled to fit in her new environment. At other times, I was afraid of her, wondering if she may have been influenced by her mom.

Good Me Bad Me by Ali Land is not your usual fast-paced thriller. It’s the kind of book where the tension slowly builds through each page. I was fascinated by the narrative although for the first time, I read the book with a feeling of uneasiness and dread all the way to the last page. I have never been this nervous or chilled by the actions of characters.

This is the kind of book that can be considered as thought provoking because questions of nature versus nurture come up throughout the narrative. Does evil beget evil? I found myself thinking about this as I read Milly’s narration and I didn’t get the answers in this case until the final chapter. The ending of this book is just as chilling as the rest of it. It left me feeling unsettled. I am pretty sure that this is one book that I will be thinking about for a while.

The story is completely gripping. Milly has had a truly horrific childhood, with a single mother who was clearly deranged. She then had the hardest decision to make that any child could, to give her mother up to the police, or let her continue her murderous ways. Her Mother may have been a serial killer but Milly still loved her.

This is a story that will keep you thinking about it for days afterwards. The writing in it is seamless and the pace keeps you turning the pages (or clicking the button in the case of a kindle) There are parts where you feel that you are actually inside Milly’s head which is not a particularly nice place to be. Despite the sympathy you feel for her and her life there is something about Milly that makes the reader a bit uneasy. As the story unfolds you get drawn deeper into the family and realise that secrets are clearly everywhere. One of the bits I enjoyed most was the way the novel Lord of the Flies was referenced. The mob mentality is clearly evident throughout the novel and you realise just how cruel children can be,

This was an excellent and very disturbing book that will stay with you long after you finish it.

I have been wanting to read this book for ages and have seen plenty of reviews some good and some mediocre but I am glad that I did read this and formed my own opinion. I can recommend this book to other readers who enjoy reading thrillers

Milly lives in a beautiful, big house, with people who care about her. Her future looks bright.

Annie lives with a monster who has made her existence a living hell. All she stands to inherit is a legacy of horror.

But Annie and Milly are the same person.

When 15 year old Annie turns up at a police station to report her mother no one believes her nightmarish story, until they see the scars left by a lifetime of horrific abuse and find the tiny dead bodies of the kidnapped children. She is given a new identity and sent to live with a caring, if slightly dysfunctional, couple and their moody teenage daughter Phoebe, until she is strong enough to stand witness against her mother. As the date of the trial draws closer, and with her mother’s face all over the news, Milly struggles to hide her secret from those around her. That isn’t the only battle she is fighting, however, as she soon discovers that a new name and a new address cannot erase the damage that her mother has done to her. But who is stronger, Good Milly or Bad Annie?

This is an exceptional debut novel, thrilling, dark and disturbing. Land throws the readers deep into the psyche of the protagonist by letting her narrate the story as though she were addressing her serial killer mother. It is a technique that allows us glimpses of an unimaginable life of sexual, mental and physical torture, and both the visible and invisible scars that this abuse has left behind. The subject matter is obviously incredibly upsetting but Land manages to give suggestions of what has happened without ever describing it in graphic detail. Annie/Milly is an extraordinary character, vulnerable yet hugely unsettling and wildly unpredictable, meaning readers are never quite sure where they stand with her. It has been tipped as one to look out for in 2017 and deservedly so.

Annie/Milly is the daughter of a serial killer. She has been abused and used herself, made to watch while children are killed, used as a shield to protect her Mother in her twisted acts of violation. The book is written in the first person, we see everything through Annie's eyes as she prepares to give evidence at her Mother's trial and battles with her memories. Annie had finally gone to the Police, been believed and watched as her mother is taken away. She has then been given therapy, a new identity (Milly) and a new home with a foster family. Mike, foster father, is a professional counsellor and provides support for her along with secretly writing a book about her. His family is not so keen and the daughter, Phoebe, makes life as hard as possible for Milly is some truly awful ways. The book races to a, for me, curiously flat ending but maybe that is only in contrast to the rest of the book.
This is the ultimate page-turner, it had me eating up the book, unable to pause for breath. If it had been a slower paced read then I think I would have started to pick holes in the story along the lines of surely someone would.., why would you.., haven't they noticed.... However, I didn't get chance and, despite not being the greatest fan of thrillers, I loved it. Compulsive reading.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for review copy.

I kept thinking of Rose West... a shocking, dark psychological chiller. Unusual teenage protagonist too.

The premise is simple, but effective - a female serial killer is shopped by her own teenage daughter. My my, eyebrows raise - I did imagine if Rose and Fred West's child had been more involved with their activities, this could have been her story.

Annie has finally decided to go to the police, her mother is arrested, she is placed in a foster home with a psychologist, his wife, and their teenage daughter while she awaits the trial date at which she will be witness.

Land lets us a little way into Annie's mind, now called Milly. We see the effect her upbringing has had - the guilt she feels, the love she cannot help but feel, the strain of trying to live a life of school and family while remembering hideous events and dreading being in the same room as her mother again at her trial.

Milly/Annie is a nicely created character - she tells us her story, we know her feelings, she's been manipulated and abused her entire life, and is still only a teenager herself. So when her foster sister is less than friendly, and she sees for herself that a 'normal' family can have its own secrets, we just hope she'll get through the trial and every school day.

Her foster sister is truly nasty at times, a Queen Bee that I found hard to believe everyone would so blindly follow. There are two young characters I wanted to see more of - one local girl, herself not well cared for, who becomes a friend and confidante of sorts of Milly's, and the only human-seeming boy at Milly's school, who stands up for her.

Lord of the Flies is referenced throughout the book, the play Milly's school is putting on, and while I didn't see the similarities at first, it was quite aptly placed in the story and well chosen.

The story takes us through Milly's mother's trial, and while her crimes are described, there are very few graphic scenes of her murders and abuse, it never becomes truly uncomfortable and upsetting, though the subject itself is bound to strike a nerve (and a mother and pregnant woman, I certainly didn't find it 'enjoyable' reading).

Very interesting subject and choice of narrator, the few twists may surprise, it does keep you wanting to find out how it will all end, and Milly's character develops nicely for the reader as her past and present are both illuminated.

With such a sensitive subject (and a couple of strong sexual scenes), I would say this is for ages 14 and above.

With thanks to Netgalley for for advance copy, sent for review purposes.

This is a debut novel by Ali Land and is a brilliant, but dark and twisted, read.

Annie's is a young girl living with her mother who is a serial killer. This is made more horrific by the fact that all the victims are young children. Annie knows about it but decides, at the age of 15, to tell the police when a young boy, whom Annie had befriended, was murdered.

Annie is adopted and her name changed to Milly, but her past haunts her and she does not want to be part of her evil mother. She tries to conform but she struggles with her feelings while undergoing the questioning during her mother's murder trial.

The twists and turns in this book are fast and furious and you are on an emotional rollercoaster throughout. I highly recommend this and look forward to reading more books by this author.