The Good Son by Jacquelyn Mitchard

The Good Son by Jacquelyn Mitchard – 353 pages 

ARC from Mira and Netgally for an honest review 

Book Blurb:

The Good Son by Jacquelyn Mitchard asks: What do you do when the person you love best becomes unrecognizable to you? For Thea Demetriou, the answer is both simple and agonizing: you keep loving him somehow.
Stefan was just seventeen when he went to prison for the drug-fueled murder of his girlfriend, Belinda. Three years later, he’s released to a world that refuses to let him move on. Belinda’s mother, once Thea’s good friend, galvanizes the community to rally against him to protest in her daughter’s memory. The media paints Stefan as a symbol of white privilege and indifferent justice. Neighbors, employers, even some members of Thea’s own family turn away.
Meanwhile Thea struggles to understand her son. At times, he is still the sweet boy he has always been; at others, he is a young man tormented by guilt and almost broken by his time in prison. But as his efforts to make amends meet escalating resistance and threats, Thea suspects more forces are at play than just community outrage. And if there is so much she never knew about her own son, what other secrets has she yet to uncover—especially about the night Belinda died?

My Review: 4 stars

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The Good Son by Jacquelyn Mitchard tackles an important issue, prisoner reformation, which leads into a compelling storyline about family. I’ve read a few of Mitchard’s books, who is most well-known for The Deep End of the Ocean. 

As per usual, I knew little to nothing about the storyline and was completely intrigued by the first sentence, “I was picking my son up at the prison gates when I spotted the mother of the girl he murdered.” This does everything that a book needs to do on the first page; it sets up the story and engages the reader. I wanted to know everything from that could cause a mother to state those words, and I imagine you will too.

The book offers a lot of topics for discussion as we see this young man, Stefan, come home after three years in jail. We see how hard it is for him to gain employment, the new disdain neighbors and friends treat him with, the guilt that overpowers him after killing his girlfriend in a drug induced rage, and how hard the parents try to make life okay for him. The author does a good job of showing the small intimacies within a family and the cracks within a marriage. 

There is a second storyline peppered throughout the book from a semi-anonymous caller that continually warns Thea, Stefan’s mother, that Stefan can never speak about the night of the murder. Creepy and threatening events happen to the family and Thea is convinced there’s more to the story than what she knows. Is this mother’s intuition or is she being played? I found this storyline to be a great addition to the plot but after some time, it became laborious. I wanted it all wrapped up quicker than it did. This will be a winner for fans of mysteries wrapped around a family drama. 

Quotes I liked:

I was picking my son up at the prison gates when I spotted the mother of the girl he murdered.”

“Stefan owed his life to her as surely as Belinda owed her death to Stefan. In seconds, life reverses.”

“An addict for hope is like an addict for anything.”

“But I guess that’s why they call it doing time. Time is all you’re doing. Time is passing. Your life is passing. Time is terrifying if you can’t be useful.”