At one point in Ali Land's debut novel, Good Me Bad Me, the narrator, Milly, says her insides look different from everyone else's--"A curious, twisted shape. The shape you made me. The shape I'm learning to live with." The off-stage voice of "you" that twisted and shaped Milly is that of her mother, a serial killer of children.
Milly turned her mother in after the ninth murder--a boy Milly knew. Now she is in foster care with Mike, a psychologist and expert in trauma, and his wife, Saskia, an anorexic alcoholic and pill-popper. Their teenage daughter, Phoebe, Milly soon discovers, is also an expert in trauma, although "more in the causing than the healing." With Mike's help, Milly has a chance to heal, but her mother's voice is in her head, and she visits in dreams at night as a snake: "Lie your scaly body next to mine, measure me. Remind me I still belong to you." Milly was severely abused, but she misses her mother with the confusion a child feels when tenderness and violence are mixed. Children want the familiar. Milly says:
"The truth. Is. I don't find the idea of people or children hurting and killing each other upsetting.
"I find it familiar. I find it is home."
At school, Milly is an outsider. She speaks "like a robot" and hides her hands because they sometimes shake from permanent damage to her nervous system. A crude, doctored photo of her is taped to her locker. She is jeered at and worse, but she is tough and plays a long game. When Phoebe and her cohorts push and slap her, Milly thinks, "See me, feel me, but know that I come from a place where this is merely a warm-up.... And I never forget." Milly has a compromised ability to read emotions, but she has no trouble understanding Phoebe and her friends.
Her mother's trial is coming up; Milly will have to testify. Her mother is a manipulator par excellence. Milly both dreads and desires their match of wits. One question she knows will be asked: Why did she wait until she was almost 16 to tell the police? Answer: Her mother had planned her "Sweet Sixteen" birthday, with four invitees. "A birthday you'll never forget, you said. Or survive, I remember thinking... I was the present. The piñata to punch."
After the trial, Phoebe pushes Milly to the limit, but what is Milly's limit? She wants to "believe and prove the curious shape you twisted my heart into could be untwisted." She is scalded by brutality, programmed to deception. Can she discard and outrun what lives inside of her?
With savageries only hinted at--"One minute you'd be arranging flowers, the next you'd demand I put on a show"--Ali Land coolly ratchets up tension and takes the reader into a damaged mind, exploring the question of nature versus nurture, and the possibility of redemption. Good Me Bad Me is a heartbreaking, breathtaking chill of a book. --Marilyn Dahl
Shelf Talker: The teenage daughter of a serial killer mother is both her victim and a witness against her in a harrowing novel of deception and torment.