Blog Tour: A Better Bad Idea by Laurie Devore

*ARC provided by the publishers through Turn The Page Tours in exchange for an honest review*

Publication Date: March 16th 2021

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Evelyn Peters is desperate. Desperate for a way out of McNair Falls, the dying southern town that’s held her captive since the day she was born. Desperate to protect her little sister from her mother’s terrifying and abusive boyfriend. And desperate to connect with anyone, even fallen golden boy Ashton Harper, longtime boyfriend of the girl Evelyn can never stop thinking about ― beautiful, volatile, tragically dead Reid Brewer.

Until a single night sends Evelyn and Ashton on a collision course that starts something neither of them can stop. With one struck match, their whole world goes up in flames. The only thing left to do is run―but leaving McNair Falls isn’t as easy as just putting distance between here and there and some secrets refuse to stay left behind.

A reckoning is coming… and not everyone is getting out alive.

About the Author …

Laurie Devore was born and raised in small town South Carolina and graduated from Clemson University. After four years in the balmy Midwest, she returned to her home in the south, where she now lives and works in Charleston. In her spare time, she reluctantly runs marathons, watches too much TV, and works a “y’all” into every conversation. She is the author of Winner Take All and How to Break a Boy.

My Thoughts & Feelings …

Trigger Warnings: domestic abuse, child abuse, murder, arson, guns, alcoholism, drowning.

Something I’ve been doing a lot recently is leaving everything important until the last possible minute. I did it with my Uni applications, I’m doing it with my art-history project that’s due in tomorrow that I haven’t even started yet and I did it with this book which I finished last night at about 1am. To say I’m stressed is an understatement.

If I could use one word to describe this book it would be: Complicated. I mean this in terms of the characters, the timeline, and even my own feelings.

A Better Bad Idea is told from the perspective of two girls: Reid and Evelyn and also closely follows a third character named Ashton. It switches between a Before and After timeline that follows the events leading up to and following Reid’s tragic death. We see how these characters have impacted and influenced each other, not necessarily in the most positive of ways.

The characters are morally grey and are each going through their own hard times and because of school I wasn’t reading this consecutively, it was a bit here and a bit there, so that made it a lot harder to connect to them.

In my eyes this is a book where everything comes together in the end though and really makes you feel things. I think this book did a great job at portraying certain feelings. I really felt the characters desperation to escape, the loneliness they felt and the sense of being trapped. I mean I was crying by the end of it.

While not exactly what I was expecting I’d recommend this if you’re in the mood for a very character driven story that deals with a variety of heavy subject (TW’s above). Part of me really wishes I’d been able to read this in one sitting, I think it would have resonated with me a lot more.