Goodbye, Perfect

Sara Barnard

Age 12 +
15 April 2021
9781529037623
320 pages

Synopsis

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

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.

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.
I felt like I was living this book