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Good Girl Complex (An Avalon Bay Novel) by Elle Kennedy

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for an ARC of this book. All opinions in this review are my own.

I finally finished this book, after the almost 2.5 months it took to read it. I have been reflecting as to what about it made it so hard for me to finish (as I can finish many books in a day or two), and so much about this book had appealed to me. It has alternating perspectives between the two main characters (which I love), it has a grumpy-sunshine trope (kinda), it has people defying expectations and breaking free of what is expected of them to find a place where they feel they belong. The one knock in the blurb, that I knew from the get-go was going to be a bummer for me, was the “secret that could destroy them” trope, cause I hate when an entire relationship implodes when they could have just talked to each other and it would have been fine. But these things aside, I still found myself struggling to pick up, let alone finish, this book.

I am not sure if I know the answer. This could be one of those books that I like on paper (in blurb form) and just not as much in reality. I can only really think of one thing that sticks out as being a major issue for me, and that’s the fact that Cooper’s temper and impulsivity made me want to smack him. Like I get it, you trust no one and nothing, but also, if you maybe spent five minutes talking to literally any other human in the world, some (definitely not all – looking at you Shelley) of your problems would be solved. All of the other things in this book were just feelings I had that made it hard for me to continue reading. I am not giving up on this author or even other books from this set, as the characters were varied, but this was not what I was expecting it to be.