#Review - Good Girls Don't Die by Christina Henry

Good Girls Don't Die
Christina Henry
Titan Books, 21 November 2023
Available as: PB, 336pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781803364018

I'm grateful to Titan Books for providing me with an advance e-copy of  Good Girls Don't Die to consider for review.

In the first part of Good Girls Don't Die, Henry presents us with three narratives. Each features a woman being isolated and manipulated in a way that reflects her online activity - almost as if somebody was listening in all along...

In the first of these, Celia awakes in a small town with a husband and child whose identities she can't remember and a cosy restaurant she knows nothing about. At first, all this resembles one of those nightmares where you have to sit an exam with no preparation - Celia's trying to stay one step ahead and not let on that she's all at sea. But then a body turns up, and the deceased's son, the town policeman, has her in the frame for the killing. Her "husband" is creepy as hell and she has nowhere to turn for help.

In the second, Allie's been got up in the kind of short shorts she'd NEVER wear and seems to be on the way to a cabin in the woods with some boys from college - NOT what she set out to do at all. And then, again, the killings begin.

In the third scenario, rather more brazenly, Maggie and a group of other women have been kidnapped and are being forced to participate in a Hunger Games style death-off - a race against the clock through a grim killing maze.

The common factor behind all the scenarios is a cryptic social media conversation, suggesting some common purpose here - but what, and how could such a thing have been set up? It seems as though a single entity - a man? An intelligence of some sort? - is punishing all three women, and, as friends and allies die, their only resource will be their own courage, determination and empathy - needed to discern what is safe and what is a trap. From that perspective, despite the myriad practical hazards, the cruel traps and humiliations, this is a story of coming together and of making common cause against a pitiless enemy, against women being treated as mere toys or as objects for punishment or revenge.

While each story has its own logic and is absorbing in its own way, that overarching narrative is the most engaging and encouraging strand in Good Girls Don't Die, showing continuity with Henry's earlier stories in which women refuse to be treated as things. Fusing together the separate narratives, it puts a different spin on the three different tropes drawn on earlier and shows three women rising above the narratives that would ensnare them.

Strongly recommended! 

For more information about Good Girls Don't Die, see the publisher's website here.