50 pages • 1 hour read
Alice FeeneyGood Bad Girl: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The End: Mother’s Day”
An unnamed woman encounters an elderly woman on the way to the supermarket. The elderly woman compliments the infant child with the woman. Inside the supermarket, the woman with the child has a conversation with an old acquaintance, and as she is speaking, the child goes missing. As the woman desperately searches for her child, she reflects that she knows who took the infant and why.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Frankie: Another Mother’s Day”
Frankie, a prison librarian who was once a mother, leaves the prison on her final day of work. She reflects on how she has done bad things and is about to do a “horrible thing” because she feels that she has no other choice.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Patience”
Patience, an 18-year-old woman who works at the Windsor Care Home in London, visits an old woman who lives at the home, Edith Elliott. Edith, who resents the daughter who put her in the home but cares deeply for Patience, gives Patience a ladybug ring. Patience has smuggled in a dog, Dickens, to keep Edith company. Edith also has a teddy bear in the room. Edith gives Patience her bank card, telling her that she needs a few items for her plan to sue her daughter for renting out Edith’s house. Patience is wary of this plan and of taking anything from Edith, but she begrudgingly agrees.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Frankie”
After leaving the prison, Frankie heads to the cemetery where her mother is buried. She confesses to her mother’s grave that she’s done something terrible and says goodbye to her mother “for the last time” (26).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Edith”
Edith’s daughter, Clio, visits her in the home. Clio tells her mother that there isn’t enough money left to keep her in the home for much longer, so they’ll need to find a different solution. When Edith asks if she can live with Clio, Clio rejects the idea, saying that Edith is too judgmental and difficult to live with.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Clio”
Clio goes downstairs to see if she can get the home’s manager, Joy Bonetta, to agree to an alternate financing plan. Joy says that she can’t offer a different financial plan but that she understands the burden of keeping a loved one in a home, emphasizing that she’s available to help Clio “in any way” she can (35). Clio is confused by what Joy is implying, but before she can press much further, Mr. Henderson, one of the home’s residents, barges in and complains that someone’s been stealing things from his room.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Patience”
Patience cleans Mr. Henderson’s room, listening to music while she works. She begins to steal small items, feeling little remorse because Mr. Henderson has been both verbally and physically abusive toward her in the past. While snooping, Patience uncovers endearing love letters that Mr. Henderson writes to his dead wife. These make her feel bad about stealing, so she starts to put the items back. However, she’s caught by Joy, who comes to check on her. Joy fires Patience and kicks her out of the home before Patience can get her bag or the dog from Edith’s room.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Edith”
While Edith is in bed that night, someone knocks on the door. They enter without Edith’s consent. Edith recognizes the person once she sees them.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Frankie”
A nervous Frankie drives to Clio’s house under the pretense of seeking Clio’s services as a therapist. Clio welcomes Frankie into the house, and Frankie privately reflects that she’s here because there’s someone in this house who must pay for what she has lost.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Patience”
Patience returns to her apartment, which a man named Jude Kennedy owns. Because the apartment is not in good enough condition to rent, Jude lets Patience stay for free; however, he does require her to give him something monthly that she doesn’t want to. Jude knocks on Patience’s door, telling her that he’ll just come back tomorrow if she doesn’t answer, but Patience ignores him. She reflects that she won’t live here anymore by tomorrow night. She leaves the apartment once she’s sure he’s gone.
Chapters 1-10 Analysis
Like many contemporary thrillers, Good Bad Girl uses a narrative structure that oscillates between various characters’ points of view. Also like many thrillers, it uses these perspective switches to create cliffhangers at the ends of most chapters. Patience’s revelation that she’s “lied to Edith Elliot about almost everything” at the end of Chapter 3 (21), for example, casts doubt on Patience’s motivations and implies that Edith might be in danger, building tension. Feeney also uses the narrative structure to thread red herrings into the plot. Much of the narrative tension in Good Bad Girl hinges on the reader, much like the characters, not fully understanding the connections between various women in the novel. The novel’s fragmented structure contributes to these confusions. For instance, Chapter 3 establishes that Edith lives in a care home and has an estranged daughter; in Chapter 4, Frankie visits the grave of her dead mother, who lived in a care home and with whom she didn’t have a healthy relationship. This chapter pairing immediately raises questions—for instance, whether Edith is Frankie’s estranged mother, and, if so, whether the narrative will unfold in chronological order. Feeney resolves these questions in Chapter 5, which reveals that Clio is Edith’s estranged daughter. These red herrings create narrative tension while also suggesting that these women’s lives mirror one another’s in many ways—thus hinting at a broader commentary on women’s experiences.
Feeney also uses the oscillation between different point-of-view characters to seed legitimate clues to the solution to the mystery. For example, this early section includes a telling detail in two different characters’ sections: Both Frankie and Patience count their steps as they walk. Patience’s narration chalks this up to the fact that “[b]ad habits can be contagious” (54). This link invites the reader to assume that Frankie is Patience’s estranged mother, which she in fact is. However, the sheer number of red herrings raises the possibility that this clue, like so many others, might be intended to mislead. This interplay between legitimate clues and red herrings creates narrative momentum and invites the reader to invest themselves in separating fact from fiction.
Feeney shifts between using the first and third person for different point-of-view characters: Clio, Edith, and Frankie all have third-person narration, while Patience and the unnamed narrator of the backstory sections have first-person narration. This serves a few purposes. First, granting Patience first-person narration distinguishes her from the other women. Patience’s emotional struggles are at the heart of the novel’s thematic material, and her history is the motivation driving most of the other women around her; keeping her narration close and immediate thus allows Good Bad Girl’s major themes to remain front and center. Just as importantly, the use of the first person for the unnamed narrator (later revealed to be Edith) keeps that narrator entirely anonymous. This allows Feeney to lure the reader into believing that this narrator must be Clio before revealing that it is actually her mother.
The alternation between the first and third person also has thematic significance. Good Bad Girl is deeply interested in The Plurality of Identity and how people construct their identities—particularly in the gap that can exist between a person’s private and public personas, as well as the question of whether one of those personas is “truer” than the other. The third versus first person split evokes that gap between outer and inner selves, though in practice, the novel’s use of close third person means that readers have access to even Clio, Edith, and Frankie’s interiority.
Another theme that the novel immediately establishes as central involves Reimagining the Expectations of Motherhood. The chapter titles identify both the flashbacks and the main narrative as unfolding on Mother’s Day, but the content of those chapters is utterly divorced from the holiday’s warm connotations. Rather, the first chapter depicts the violent separation of an (apparent) mother and child, symbolically setting the stage for the many ruptured mother-daughter bonds that feature in the novel.
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By Alice Feeney
