Book Review: TGD

September 17, 2019

Book Review: TGD

THE GOOD DAUGHTER, KARIN SLAUGHTER

“Nothing ever truly faded. Time only dulled the edges.”
- Karin Slaughter, The Good daughter

Title: The Good Daughter

Author: Karin Slaughter

Publisher: Harper Collins

Genre: Psychological Thriller, Domestic Thriller

Format: Paperback

Language: English

Pages: 500

Synopsis:

It follows the Quin family, mainly Sam & Charlie, the 2 sisters. The majority of the story takes place in 2017, where one of the sisters is an eye witness of a school shooting and while unraveling this incident, past comes knocking at the door. The dark secrets that were buried deep on the day of the incident that took place 28 years ago and that destroyed the Quinn family’s lives, is about to be unraveled.

My Thoughts

A quote from the book

I believe its best to go into this book without knowing much about the plot. It's best to dive in without any clue about the story and be shocked as the mysteries are unveiled.

I picked up The Good Daughter by Karin Slaughter thinking it would be Gillian Flynn-Esque psychological thriller but it is more of a domestic thriller. None the less, it is freakin amazing!

The book is narrated in 3rd person and is told through two perspectives, Sam and Charlie. The story doesn't exactly go back and forth in time but there are 4 chapters where you are taken back to 1989 on the day of the incident that changed the Quinn family's lives. 2 chapters are narrated from the perspective of Sam and 2 from Charlie’s perspective, and every time the incident is narrated you find out something new.

This book. Honey, this book has violence! It shook me! It disturbed me to a point where I had to put the book down & breathe. And mind you, I'm not the one to get disturbed easily, that too by reading gory stuff. In movies, you get visuals of blood, guts & all those dirty stuff so it's easier to get disturbed and I don't get disturbed by even such things! But man this book managed to do it! I think Karin Slaughter’s vivid and detailed descriptions did the trick for me, and that’s what she probably wanted, to paint a clear picture in the reader’s mind about the violence and brutality of humans.

I annotated the heck out of this book! You should see my annotations in the book, I wrote all my frustrations down(but I can't show you as it would serve as spoilers) This book also has a lot of family drama, but I actually did not mind it cause it was somehow important for the progression of the plot.

The writing is good, the plot is intense, well structured and intricately woven, the imagery is so evocative and immersive. I'd definitely give trigger warnings for rape, assault, murder, a(very)graphic miscarriage, police brutality. There is adultery, there is sexist stuff that annoyed me so much. That's probably what the author wanted. I understand that we all have flaws, we all make mistakes. But some people are simply bad, no explanation, no excuses, no traumatic past can justify it and this book features characters like this. People do some really bad stuff in this book. This might sound weird but I love such characters! They are always interesting to read about. Any author who can write such dark, evil characters well, I applaud them! It is hard to write such characters and make the readers like that character. Everybody likes a morally good, relatable character they can connect to, but it's hard to well structure and develop a dark, evil character and make the reader like it without making the character relatable to the reader. And yes, you can love a dark and corrupt character, not because you relate to them or you like what they do but because of the way it's written and portrayed and how well it justifies the role of that character. It's like, liking a villain in the movie because of the role well played.

Coming to this book If you wanna read a thriller that will shake you, pick this up. The mysteries unveiled will blow your mind! If you love dark, brutal and raw thrillers, The Good Daughter won’t disappoint.