When your best friend goes rogue, to a 15-something school-goer, it’s the teenage equivalent of an existential crisis and there is no recovering from that. Sara Barnard’s latest Young Adult (YA) thriller, Goodbye, Perfect, is about teenagers Eden and Bonnie who are just days away from their school-leaving exams.
Eden is the ‘rebel’ who “once got suspended for drawing moustaches” on the portraits of teachers in the school hallway, and Bonnie is the ‘good’ girl and ‘Head Prefect’ who plays the flute and lives for exams. And they are BFFs, quite naturally. So far so good.
The story begins one fine Saturday morning when Bonnie “runs away” with her secret boyfriend Jack and the police arrive at Eden’s doorstep for questioning. Of course, she knows where Bonnie has gone. How can the best friend not know?
Except, Eden doesn’t know, like she tells the police and everybody around, but nobody believes her. And even if she knew, Eden wouldn’t tell, because she is loyal to Bonnie despite the “betrayal”.
So she lies a little and lies some more, but when the lies begin to sound unconvincing even to her own ears, Eden knows it’s gone too far and she, only she, must do something, anything, to #bringBonnieback.
Barnard uses the usual tropes of YA fiction to create a fast-paced and engaging world of teenagers that revolves around school and boyfriends and overreaching parents. The first-person narrative, in Eden’s voice, has all the cocky self-assurance and tempestuousness of a teenager, and it’s easy to like Eden’s character.
She keeps lobbing them grenades of reality, of class and race equations that play out in everyday life, and they hit home with a silent thud. There are places where the narrative sounds far too mature, almost like a parent’s wagging finger, but one could chalk that down to the book’s underlying themes of child grooming and paedophilia, increasingly potent threats in the digital era.
The book is almost a plea, a silent prayer, to lost friendships and broken promises. And it makes a strong case for the voice of the young adult.
julie.m.v@thehindu.co.in
Goodbye, Perfect; Sara Barnard, Macmillan, ₹399