As Good As Dead by Holly Jackson (GGGTM Book 3)

Alrightie-o! I’m finally finished with this series, and it was a banger! I am super proud to say that this was my first ever murder mystery and I loved it. It’s not that I am against murder mysteries or thrillers as a genre in books, I just had never picked up a murder mystery book until GGGTM.

This series was recommended by, a round of applause, BookTok. I have gotten nearly all of the books on my TBR from BookTok and I’m not ashamed of it. BookTok has a lot of books that I love, but I do take books there with a grain of salt, as some people have a different taste from me. I don’t mean to sound pretentious, but I value great writing in books as well as a banger plotline. That’s why I loved books like GGGTM, but I do know that a lot of the books on BookTok aren’t that way. Sorry, BookTok, but I do have a little bit of dignity.

Anyway, I loved this book, even though it gave me even more anxiety than I already have. If I had to rank the books in GGGTM, this wouldn’t be the top (it’d probably be Good Girl, Bad Blood), but it’s definitely not bad at all. It was a hard read though because I had gotten so invested in the series and I loved Pip, and, in this book, it’s super difficult to watch my girl fall apart bit by bit. Especially at the very end when…Aha, you thought! Nah this is a family-friendly page with absolutely no spoilers because I am a nice person.

Back to the point, I got a lot of the feels this third time around with Holly Jackson. Pip went through it hard, and the end was super sad. I, like, 1000% never shed a tear at anything in books. I swear, I’ve read The Song of Achilles, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and other tear-jerkers and didn’t even bat an eye. Don’t get me wrong—they’re super sad books and I felt the emotions—they just didn’t trigger the tear glands. I only really cry in movies, but, astonishingly, I have shed a few tears during some books. I can’t remember exactly the ones I did, but I get emotionally attached to books, okay? And I’m just emotionally unstable in general, so sue me!

The point I’m trying to make is that I teared up a little bit and had a therapy session with my reflection around the end of the book. That’s the feels I went through. I loved the ending, but after the emotional rollercoaster that was going up and down up until the very end, I was just super glad everything worked out. I really just needed an emotional break from that whole series for a while, but I loved it all the same. A great ending to a great series that helped spark my interest in murder mysteries.

Genre: murder mystery, thriller

Age: 14+

Rating: 8.5/10