✱✱ Book Review ✱✱ The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall

I spent some time this afternoon finishing up Zoe Whittall's The Best Kind of People.

A local schoolteacher is arrested, leaving his family to wrestle with the possibility of his guilt, in this exquisite novel about loyalty, truth, and happiness.

The Woodburys cherish life in the affluent, bucolic suburb of Avalon Hills, Connecticut. George is a beloved science teacher at the local prep school, a hero who once thwarted a gunman, and his wife, Joan, is a hardworking ER nurse. They have brought up their children in this thriving town of wooded yards and sprawling lakes.

Then one night a police car pulls up to the Woodbury home and George is charged with sexual misconduct with students from his daughter’s school. As he sits in prison awaiting trial and claiming innocence, Joan vaults between denial and rage as friends and neighbors turn cold. Their daughter, seventeen-year-old Sadie, is a popular high school senior who becomes a social outcast—and finds refuge in an unexpected place. Her brother, Andrew, a lawyer in New York, returns home to support the family, only to confront unhappy memories from his past. A writer tries to exploit their story, while an unlikely men’s rights activist group attempts to recruit Sadie for their cause.

Provocative and unforgettable, The Best Kind of People reveals the cracks along the seams of even the most perfect lives and the unraveling of an American family.

Momma Says: 2 out of 5 stars ⭐⭐

I found this book to be more confusing than anything else. The story starts inside the head of school shooter, bent on taking out his girlfriend who works at the school. I assume this is to show how George's heroic actions during the crisis endeared him to the community, but there is little else about it throughout the book. From there, it jumps to a few years later and into the middle of an intimate scene between Sadie, George's 17 year old daughter, and her boyfriend, and I'm still scratching my head over the relevancy of that. Once George is arrested, I expected the real story here to begin taking shape and thought that I would learn something of his guilt or innocence, which would create some suspense to the story. Instead, I got what began to feel like an information dump about a lot of other people. There are pages and pages of the sexual activity of teenagers, along with their drug use and drinking, but the story reads as if all the teenagers in this community are participating in such activity, making it hard to empathize with Sadie's behavior being the result of the charges against her father. In fact, I found little about any of the characters to elicit empathy, other than the wife. Joan's behavior and reactions were the only ones that made much sense. But, as crazy as it sounds, I did keep reading, mostly out of curiosity about George than anything else, but the bulk of the story was just more of the same. George, who this story supposedly revolves around, isn't what I would consider even a secondary character. Finally, we get to the ending, which was a disappointment at best. The conclusion is rushed and unrealistic in many aspects. After giving it some thought, I believe there were just too many characters and too much going on for the author to stay on track and instead of one family's struggle to cope, it became a bit of mess of several characters running in different directions. 

**Advanced Reader Copy courtesy of NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine

The Best Kind of People is available for purchase at the following links.

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Kobo
Google


Thanks for joining me!

Momma😘

Connect with  me on Facebook and Twitter