Book #588 – The Good Girl by Mary Kubica

For my Minnesota pick, I decided on The Good Girl, the debut novel of Mary Kubica. The other choices on the list were American Gods by Neil Gaiman which honestly bopped around the United States a bit too much to pin it to one state, and the sequels to Shiver, which I still need to read as part of my initiative to review all a series in one post. After those, I would have had to pull honorable mentions from another Stephen King novel, and the various young adult supernatural and general romance novels that seem to exist for every state. Not saying that The Good Girl was bad, but given the mixed reviews that already exist for it, I figured I’d justify my choice.

The Good Girl was originally published in 2014, it is the first of Mary Kubica’s psychological thrillers. The book has been met with mixed reviews, mostly due to comparisons that I’ll explain in a bit, and it was nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award and the Strand Critics Award for Debut Novel. While there are no current adaptations of the novel, it was announced in 2018 that Grey Matter Productions and Topic Studios would be attempting a TV series based on the novel. Just, don’t get it confused with the 2002 film of the same name starring Jennifer Aniston.

Book #159 – Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

This book on teenage werewolves was published during my freshman year of college, in 2009. Weirdly, despite it being right up the alley of my fantasy-loving teenage heart, I had never heard of this series (or Stiefvater’s other Raven series). I blame working 20-30 hours of work on top of my 18 hours of classes for falling off the book bandwagon. So, coming back to this a decade after I was in the target age group, there’s a lot I noticed that I might not have noticed a decade again.

The book follows Grace and Sam, a girl and her werewolf. Unlike mythical werewolves, this book introduces a variety of shifters affected by temperature. Grace, a high school student, is attacked by wolves as a child, and remains weirdly attached to them afterwards. It’s one of those young adult paranormal romance novels that makes you wonder about the sanity of teenage girls.