As Good As Dead – Holly Jackson

Welcome- ladies, gentlemen, and those of us who know better (I stole this greeting, please don’t kill me.)

So this is the final book of the AGGGTM trilogy, and all I need to say is that it’s… not great.
Understatement. It’s actually kind of terrible, which is something I never expected from reading the beginning of this series.

This trilogy was supposed to be good! Filled to the bucketed brims of suspense, overflowing with paced anxiety that made the reader want to rip out pages (figuratively!) to find out what happens next.

But guess what? I was only right for 50% of the series.

sigh.

_

I had been waiting for a long time for a book continuing the series I loved. Murder mystery packed with thriller packed with tinges of romance, it was layered in extensive amounts of genre relation. But the one real plot twist about the series is how Holly Jackson 360 no-scoped everyone’s predictions and came up with one of the worst plot ideas I’ve read for murder mysteries as a whole.

I’d like to say that she actually started off well with the first book and around half of the second book, but it slowly degraded as I realized Pip’s character was turning into more of a psychopath and less of the innocent, sweet teenage girl who just solved the murder of the decade in Connecticut, probably.

So… let’s start with Pip and her character development.

Essentially, Pip was faced with a strong case of PTSD as she just witnessed many things correlated to being on the upstander side of a murder, and yeah… I agree that it was a believable excuse that she was wary of everything and got jumpscared by the smallest occurrence. But then again, who wouldn’t be traumatized if this was real life?
I originally thought that the point of this book was to highlight how characters rising from the ashes would be uplifting to other people experiencing PTSD or other trauma types, but rather it showed exactly how weak our quote-on-quote “strong” female character was. This was a huge disappointment, and I’d like to give a slow clap to the author for planning this out.

I also think that the way Pip turned out to act wasn’t entirely appropriate for most YA readers. Books 1 and 2 were most definitely written for teenagers, but not this one. The fact that Pip HERSELF looked to a darker side of drugs, murder, and self-harm was utterly rubbish and nonsensical drama which her character never deserved in the first place. Pip was surrounded by loving people; her parents, boyfriend Ravi, best/close friends, and others- and yet she still yearned over possibilities of “taking the pain away” was so disheartening, I hated reading the rest of the book.

UGH.

Is it weird to say that I expected book 3 (and also 2) to have the little pink bow on top with 5 stars floating overhead? Yeah, it could be, but it’s true as well. I seriously didn’t take this author for granted, and am definitely not going to give her more than 3 stars, maximum.

But I’d want to analyze more about the plot before I get to the rating.

Like I said before, Pip developed the coping mechanism of fighting PSTD with pills. Round, cylindrical drugs. I saw that in the beginning of the book that she has completely lost about 68% of her sanity and is now on the deterioration stage of her relationships with family, friends, and S/O.

But the real example that killed my love for this book was the plot twist, where Pip herself committed murder. And blamed it on another person to avoid being caught.
I have waaaaaaay too many things to say about this but I really can’t fit them into the page limit of this document, so let me give you the short version: “she became the very thing she once swore to hate forever.” In this term, that very thing was a murderer, so let me just slow clap again for you, Pippa Fitz-Amobi. You really are a great character, and I love your development.
Oh excuse me. She was a great character, and I loved her development (BUT ONLY IN BOOKS 1 AND 2!!!)

Finally, after this whole melodramatic pause where Jackson essentially spelled out “disappointing” in a 120+ page essay, the conclusion is afoot, where it leaned more towards dissatisfying rather than intense and intriguing. I never liked the direction or ending the series took, so in this case, neither the journey or the destination were more important. They. Both. Sucked.
So what’s worse? Our main character severing all ties with the people she once truly loved? MC committing crimes and blaming them on a person that she never liked in the first place? Or this book?

All of the above and more would be my answer. So I honestly can’t understand, and would now like to scream in a pillow until my voice gets more raw than it already is. Do not read this book, don’t ruin this once-amazing series. Side effects of reading this again are intense crying, throwing the book at a wall and then more crying while picking it up, heavy sobbing, never seeing this author’s writing style the same again, and falling into a literary-induced semi-coma where you’ll only be able to eat ramen and drink chocolate milk.

I think when the Joker said that you can’t kill something/someone without eventually becoming that person/thing, I immediately related it to Pip. God, I used to love her arc and it seriously made me fall into heavy sadness because she didn’t live up to my already-high expectations of her.

I’d like to politely decline spending any more time writing about how terrible this book is, because I need to finish so many more reviews before the end of this year.

Because the real murder mystery here seems like the mutilation of our once inspiring Pip.

What have you done, Jackson?