Available March 10, 2020

Thanks to Therese Anne Flowler, St. Martin’s Press, and Netgalley for providing me with a digital advance copy of this novel.

Set in present day North Carolina, A Good Neighborhood follows the story of two families as their teenagers — one white and one bi-racial — fall in love. Each family makes decisions along the way that make sense to them in the moment but that ultimately lead to tragedy. A Good Neighborhood tackles very difficult topics, specifically racial prejudice, and I think largely succeeds in handling those topics with nuance and sensitivity.

Having said that, I didn’t love this novel. It started well, with interesting, well-drawn characters, but it took a long time to get going and then everything wrapped up VERY fast. It would have been nice to see some growth, redemption — something, as a result of the horrible things that happened in the story, but there seemed to be very little/none of that. Finally, I found the device of the unspecified neighbor “narrators” very distracting and ultimately, annoying. I’m not sure why that choice was made by the author, but every time the narrator intruded into the story, it took me out of the spell of the novel.

While there were things about this book that I didn’t love, I very much liked Fowler’s writing style. I look forward to reading her next novel.