I've been following Goodman's YA novel career since Yallfest 2019, where I got a very early ARC of her debut, They Wish They Were Us. Which I ended up not being a fan of: reeking of privilege and an almost total lack of diversity and the kind of problems that feel distant to the everyday person, that left readers with nothing to latch onto. Fast-forward to They'll Never Catch Us, which honed in on family dynamics, and one of the many realities of being a queer person in a heteronormative world, with characters who had so much to lose and a healthy dose of realistic fear. It was one of the best comebacks I'd seen between a debut and a sophomore novel, and it cemented The Counselors on my TBR for 2022.
Now, The Counselors itself - in this preview - sets us up for a roaring success: little flashes of a recent past that's not so good and has a number of rippling consequences, a big secret kept between friends, the very specific feeling of being crushed under the privilege of other people (even if they're your friends), and the notion that no one can truly know everything about you no matter how close to you they are. Goodman has cleverly started lining up all these little dominoes right from page one, and I can't way to see where and how they'll fall.
Now, The Counselors itself - in this preview - sets us up for a roaring success: little flashes of a recent past that's not so good and has a number of rippling consequences, a big secret kept between friends, the very specific feeling of being crushed under the privilege of other people (even if they're your friends), and the notion that no one can truly know everything about you no matter how close to you they are. Goodman has cleverly started lining up all these little dominoes right from page one, and I can't way to see where and how they'll fall.