I love Sara Barnard’s books. I enjoyed reading Beautiful Broken Things (WHICH THERE IS GOING TO BE A SEQUEL OF!!), I absolutely love reading A Quiet Kind of Thunder, so when Goodbye, Perfect was released, and I found out that Sara Barnard was going to be at YALC, I jumped at the chance to start reading this contemporary novel,

Eden McKinley knows she can’t count on much in this world, but she can depend on Bonnie, her solid, steady, straight-A best friend. So it’s a bit of a surprise when Bonnie runs away with the boyfriend Eden knows nothing about five days before the start of their GCSEs. Especially when the police arrive on her doorstep and Eden finds out that the boyfriend is actually their music teacher, Mr Cohn.

Sworn to secrecy and bound by loyalty, only Eden knows Bonnie’s location, and that’s the way it has to stay. There’s no way she’s betraying her best friend. Not even when she’s faced with police questioning, suspicious parents and her own growing doubts.

As the days pass and things begin to unravel, Eden is forced to question everything she thought she knew about the world, her best friend and herself.

After reading the blurb, I was a bit apprehensive when going into this book. Student/teacher relationships are a massive taboo in literature, especially when those student/teacher relationships are happening in secondary school. But I was interested to see how Barnard tackled this subject.

I think that Barnard writing this book from the POV of Eden and not Bonnie was the best way to write this book. I reckon that if the book was written from Bonnie’s perspective, then it would become a bit boring, but then it wouldn’t tackle the issues as much as it did. It was also interesting to see the relationship between Eden and Bonnie, and how Eden knew what Bonnie was doing was wrong, but she also didn’t want to ruin the trust that Bonnie had put in her. I can 100% relate to how Eden was feeling. There was a point in secondary school, where I had to hide so many secrets for my best friend at the time. And even though I knew that she should probably tell her parents what was going on, I decided to keep her secrets because her friendship meant so much to me. So yes, I understand how Eden felt.

“People talk about friendship like it’s only about shared loves, but it’s not. It’s also about finding the same things annoying and getting excited about the same silly, irrelevant things. It’s the person you can share a joke with, sure. But it’s also the person you can subtly roll your eyes at when someone else is talking too loudly. The person who makes the fun things better and the boring things more bearable.”

― Sara Barnard, Goodbye, Perfect

By writing by Eden’s perspective, Barnard allows us to consider the weight of the situation and makes us see that there is more than one perspective that we need to consider. It made us see Bonnie’s perspectives, the parents’ perspective… The way that grooming is explored throughout this book is clever because you can see how much Bonnie ‘loves’ Mr. Cohn, and that she would do anything for him, and for a bit, you’re drawn into their relationship and you start to believe that they actually do love each other… But then you’re reminded that actually, she’s 15. It’s illegal. It’s grooming. This book IS a contemporary, but it’s definitely not a light read. Barnard analyses the problems in a very real and honest way.

I think the only reason why I didn’t give this book 5 stars, was because Goodbye, Perfect wasn’t as good as Barnard’s previous books. I definitely preferred A Quiet Kind of Thunder, so I think that’s why I’ve given it 3.5.

If you know something about someone or something that could be bad or potentially harmful, and it doesn’t personally affect you, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t say something or think of it as the serious situation that it is. Please tell someone. Because that potentially dangerous ‘thing’ that is happening could be life-threatening. So please please please tell someone.

Disclaimer: this book was sent to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review