Her Good Girl Review and Giveaway

About the Book]

 



Title: Her Good Girl

 

Author: Elaine Stock

 

Genre: Family Life, Contemporary fiction, Coming-of-age story of a whole family


 

Release Date: January 22, 2018

Sometimes digging deep frees you to bloom.

Sadie Tremont’s will to survive is killing her. Almost 18, she’s battled one mysterious illness after another. Tara-Lynn, her mom, insists she’s the only one with the ultimate cure. Sadie can’t depend on her dad to help when his only interest is underground caving. Her grandmother too easily counts on God to help, but Sadie has stopped waiting for miracles. Callie, a café owner and new friend, might help but can she be trusted?

Then there’s Sky, Sadie’s new boyfriend who offers a sliver of joy, peace, and self-respect. When he schemes that the only way for Sadie to be happy is to escape with him from her native West Virginia hills by killing Tara-Lynn, she’s trapped.

She can’t partner with Sky to hurt the mom who has hurt her for years . . . or can she?

When tragedy strikes and threaten Sadie’s dad’s life and the shaky ground the Tremont family stands on, will they pull together or give in to the weakened earth beneath their feet?


My thoughts: This book was interesting, since I hadn't heard much about MBP. Wow, is it scary! The book was an interesting look at what it would be like to be a young woman stuck in a house where the others don't realize what is going on. I thought Elaine did a great job of bringing this side of mental illness up and bringing the characters to life.
I received this book from Celebrate Lit in exchange for my honest review.


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About the Author

Elaine Stock is the author of Always With You, which released in January 2016 and has won the 2017 Christian Small Publishers Association Book of the Year Award in fiction. And You Came Along, a novella, released in December 2017. Her novels fuse romance, family drama and faith in a clean fiction style. She is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers, Romance Writers of America, and Women’s Fiction Writers Association, and contributes to the international “Happy Sis Magazine” and “InD’tale Magazine.” In addition to Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads, she hangs out on her active six-year-old blog, Everyone’s Story, dedicated to uplifting and encouraging all readers through the power of story and hope.

Born in Brooklyn, NY, Elaine has now been living in upstate, rural New York with her husband for more years than her stint as a NYC gal. She enjoys long walks down country roads, visiting New England towns, and of course, a good book.

Guest Post from Elaine Stock

How to Bloom Against the Odds by Elaine Stock

Show tunes warm my heart and create a happy buzz in my mind. Ever since I can recall, I adored musicals, whether live performances or movies. Throw in amazing choreography and I’m definitely a happy camper! Hmm. I’m thinking you’re probably wondering why I’m kicking off a blog tour about my novel, Her Good Girl, a coming-of-age story about a whole family against the odds, chatting about actors belting out foot-tapping songs?

 



Here’s another favorite of mine: Liza Minnelli. Remember her from the movie Cabaret? A few months back I ran across this quote from her: Reality is something you rise above. These words hit home, zinged my soul. Life is not about what you’re dished out, but what you do with it instead. See, I was born into a troubled family. My mother slipped deep into the prison of mental illness; my father worked 8 days a week. Throw in a few other dysfunctional barbs and… well… that was my beginning. Is it my present? Will it be my future?

In Her Good Girl, centers on Sadie, a girl on the cusp of becoming a woman. Her life revolves around her mother’s abusive Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MBP) until Sadie discovers a way out… or is it an escape to something deeper and worse by the hands of someone else?

This is what I wrote in the “Author’s Note” section of Her Good Girl:

I first became aware of Munchausen By Proxy (MBP) several years ago when I read an article about what I thought was an emotional disturbance. Research shows that this is maltreatment (abuse and/or neglect) when a person—usually a parent—seeks emotional fulfillment by inflicting an illness on another, often one’s child, and often resulting in death. Recent cases such as the 1996 arrest of Kathy Bush for making her then nine-year-old daughter, Jennifer sick; the 2014 death of five-year-old Garnett by his mother Lacy Spears, and the recent Baby Jax case of a woman, Jessica Valik, who tampered with her son’s feeding tube, are one too many. Yet, I have not written about this type of tragedy and sadness to become a sensationalist.

Stories about the complexities of families draw my attention. I strive to tell stories that inspire others that, through the love and grace of God, one can move forward, families can heal, that there is hope, and that there is no reason to go back. Goodness can, and does, happen to troubled families.

While my mother didn’t suffer from MBP, she was controlled by the terrors of paranoid schizophrenia (I touched upon this as well in Her Good Girl, although, again, it was not autobiographical). I didn’t know about my mother’s condition until I turned 18 and she was first diagnosed at that time. However, what I did know during my childhood was that this was my family’s “normal.” Yet, it still didn’t feel right.

I wanted to rise above this emotional feeling that felt like a trap.

Enter God.

Actually, God and I clicked when I was six (that’s as far back as I can remember His grasp on me). But, it wasn’t until I was baptized into the Christian faith in my early 20s did I start feeling as if I was indeed beginning to rise above my circumstances.

Without Him, my life would be empty and meaningless.

Now, I feel as if I have a future to look forward to. All my novels will not necessarily be reflective of mental illness, but I hope my readers will see in Her Good Girl that by holding God’s hands tightly a family can heal and one can move forward, can live. Or, as one of the major themes of the novel emphasizes: Sometimes digging deep frees you to bloom.

 





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