A Better Bad Idea: Sharply drawn characters in an overly convoluted narrative

Author Laurie Davore’s previous YA efforts – How to Break a Boy and Winner Take All – are known for their broken, often outright unlikeable protagonists. Her latest, A Better Bad Idea, is much the same, a story of a pair of angry, difficult girls in a small town that was never going to be able to contain either of them, let alone make them happy.

The story is simultaneously bleak and hopeful, centered on a pair of protagonists – Reid Brewer, who is dead, and Evelyn Peters, who is not -who embody opposite ends of what is essentially the same story. They are both girls with troubled pasts and uncertain futures, and this grim tale is equal parts cautionary and cathartic.

In Macnair Falls, people do what they have to do to survive life in a dying town, whether that’s drinking, doing drugs, or punching down at people who are more vulnerable than you are in some capacity. There is poverty and abuse, residents gleefully engage in affairs and manipulation, and many have gradually become increasingly numb to the pain around them.

Evelyn is desperate for a way out of this town, away from the cruel kids at school who assume she’s promiscuous because her mom had an affair with the town sheriff, away from Dane, her current pseudo-stepfather, who’s abusive. Reid has a personality that’s too big for almost everyone around her, and her refusal to be anything less than herself is almost admirable, even if it does generally make her a huge jerk.

Yet, despite both girls’ flaws, you can’t help but root for them and hope they will somehow get better, save themselves, get out of what is surely a toxic and dangerous environment.

A Better Bad Idea: Its two female leads are both damaged and fascinating

A Better Bad Idea is technically set after Reid’s death when a chance meeting between Evelyn and Reid’s ex-boyfriend Ashton kicks off a chain of potentially deadly events. As the two flee town together, the story simultaneously unspools backward, cluing us in to both their tumultuous relationships with Reid.

Unfortunately, the novel embraces not only a dual POV format, but one in which the stories timeline jumps back and forth seemingly at random, and is measured in a series of increasingly inane and frustratingly nebulous markers (i.e. ‘six glasses of champagne later” or “two hours left”.) It’s needlessly difficult for readers to keep track of their space in the story, and ultimately becomes downright annoying.

The other unfortunate side effect of all this is that thanks to the shifting time settings, several big emotional moments occur before we’ve barely even gotten to know these characters or care about their stories. This is especially true of Ashton, who spends much of the story an emotional cipher that stands in for whatever characters or readers need him to be at that moment. (Not to mention his “oh it’s really hard to be rich and privileged I’m suffering” attitude really grates after a while. This is a town where people are struggling to eat, jerk.)

Though I suspect Reid will ultimately be A Better Bad Idea’s most controversial character, she’s also the one that I wished we’d gotten to spend more time within the story. It’s difficult to make a dead girl interesting, beyond the fact of her death, but there’s so much pain and anger here that we barely saw the surface of any of it.

A Better Bad Idea is a book that won’t be for everyone. And, to be honest, its characters are much more interesting than the convoluted, often hard-to-follow narrative that exists around them. If you enjoy books that don’t apologize or attempt to fix the damaged people at their center though? Man, have I got a story for you.

A Better Bad Idea is available now wherever books are sold. Let us know if you plan to give it a look!