Good Girl Complex by Elle Kennedy
Genre: NA Realistic Fiction
Blurb (on back of book): She does everything right. So what could go wrong?
Mackenzie "Mac" Cabot is a people pleaser. Her demanding parents. Her prep school friends. Her long-time boyfriend. It's exhausting, really, always following the rules. Unlike most twenty-year-olds, all she really wants to do is focus on growing her internet business, but first she must get a college degree at her parents' insistence. That means moving to the beachside town of Avalon Bay, a community made up of locals and the wealthy students of Garnet College.
Mac's had plenty of practice suppressing her wilder impulses, but when she meets local bad boy Cooper Hartley, that ability is suddenly tested. Cooper is rough around the edges. Raw. Candid. A threat to her ordered existence. Their friendship soon becomes the realest thing in her life.
Despite his disdain for the trust-fund kids he sees coming and going from his town, Cooper soon realizes Mac isn't just another rich clone and falls for her. Hard. But as Mac finally starts feeling accepted by Cooper and his friends, the secret he's been keeping from her threatens the only place she's ever felt at home.
MY OPINION: **
I wasn't a fan of this one, which I'm sad about since I really like Elle Kennedy's Off-Campus series a lot. I was expecting to like this one, since the tropes and overall plot are all appealing to me personally. However, this one did not hit the mark and I found it quite painful to get through, if we're being honest here.
If you've ever read Anna Todd's
After series, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about when I say that this a watered-down caricature of my mental depiction of After. While I cannot deny that I like the After series (I know), this book rubbed me the wrong way. The similarities were uncanny (good girl, bad boy, evil ex-hook-up of the boy, etc etc) and I couldn't help comparing it to After the entire time. Now, if a Harry Styles fanfiction is literally better than this book, it says a lot.
I finished this book less than a week ago and I forgot I had even read it when I was going through my list of books I needed to still write reviews for this month. The book is forgettable and the characters are forgettable. What's sad is that I can remember every main character in the Off-Campus series but for this one, I had to read through other people's reviews just to remember the name of the main girl.
Mackenzie was just so... bleh. She had nothing going for her. Cooper treated her like some sort of goddess and I guess love must really make you blind because this girl's personality was about as bland as a singular slice of cheese. The only thing we really know about her is that she's rich and that just about makes up her entire character. Her significant other even refers to her as a "clone" (rich clone) the majority of the book and we don't even get to learn much about her real interests or personality. She built a popular website but even with that, we don't get much. We don't get to see how she did it, how she's using her computer science skills now, or literally anything else.
Cooper wasn't that bad but we played up that bad boy trope so much I was expecting him to be actually... bad? Like, this man wasn't even that bad. Sure, he had some hookups and yes, he ha some tattoos but if sex and ink suddenly makes you a bad person, then this author needs to learn about a thing called sex positivity and not judging someone for what they put on their skin. He gets in some fights but they're literally justified and he spends time working to make money and cares about Mackenzie completely. He's actually just a regular, typical main love interest and didn't have the bad boy aspects I was expecting (the brooding, motorcycle-riding, grumpy man), though he did have the tattoos, I guess.
Spoilers but not really because this is a basic plot point: Mackenzie cheats on her boyfriend 1/3 of the way into the book after stating repeatedly how much she hates cheating and can't see why someone would ever do it. Yes, her boyfriend was an asshole and cheated on her as well but that does not justify her actions, especially when she claimed to be so against cheating. I was appalled at how fast we got into the cheating after all those long internal rants about her disgust towards other people who cheat. And on top of that, she had the audacity to get mad at Cooper about his cheating when she literally did the exact same thing.
The main plot behind Cooper's original seduction plan was laughable. Giving very much After vibes, Cooper decides that after getting into a fight with Mackenzie's (ex) boyfriend, Preston, he would get revenge by getting his girl to fall in love with him (Cooper) and cheat on Preston. Like, what kind of life are we living? This was so unrealistic, even more so than the After plot, and I was disgusted when reading it.
Overall, this book is not something I would recommend. It had a good idea in theory but the execution was all wrong. Unfortunately, I was not a fan of this one and don't plan on reading the companion novel when it comes out later this year (though this is subject to change should I hear that it's actually good).
Main Character: Mackenzie, Cooper
Sidekick(s): Friends, etc
Villain(s): Misunderstandings, cheating, lying, etc
Realistic Fiction Elements: This book was all very real to life.
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