Goodbye, Perfect

By (author) Barnard Sara
Short description/annotation
How far would you go to protect a friend? An incredible novel from the bestselling author of Beautiful Broken Things and A Quiet Kind of Thunder
Description

Goodbye, Perfect is a beautiful and emotional contemporary YA novel, with a powerful friendship at its heart, by bestselling author Sara Barnard.

When I was wild, you were steady . . .
Now you are wild – what am I?

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 a guy Eden knows nothing about five days before the start of their GCSEs. And it''s the last person she would have expected.

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.

Review quote
Creating authentic teenage voices is no easy thing but in Goodbye, Perfect, Sara Barnard captures the complex dynamics of teenage friendships and identity, shining an astute light on adolescent pressures. Student-teacher relationships can be controversial in fiction, but themes of coercion and grooming are sensitively handled here.
Review quote
I felt like I was living this book
Biographical note
Sara Barnard lives in Brighton and does all her best writing on trains. She loves books, book people and book things. She has been writing ever since she was too small to reach the ''on'' switch on the family Amstrad computer. She gets her love of words from her dad, who made sure she always had books to read and introduced her to the wonders of second-hand book shops at a young age. She is the author of the bestselling Beautiful Broken Things and won the YA Book Prize for her novel Goodbye, Perfect.
Promotional headline
How far would you go to protect a friend? An incredible novel from the bestselling author of Beautiful Broken Things and A Quiet Kind of Thunder
Review quote: previous work
Creating authentic teenage voices is no easy thing but in Goodbye, Perfect, Sara Barnard captures the complex dynamics of teenage friendships and identity, shining an astute light on adolescent pressures. Student-teacher relationships can be controversial in fiction, but themes of coercion and grooming are sensitively handled here.
Review quote: previous work
This gripping novel examines anxiety, identity, pressure and power with Barnard’s characteristic lightness of touch.