A Literary Apothecary

I love stories about unhinged female friendships. I can’t help it! Every time I see a book that mentions the toxic entanglement of two women or girls, I’m immediately intrigued. There’s something in these relationships that creates a compelling tension. Women are socialized to love each other, but also hate each other, and to see these feelings brought to the extremes is fascinating. Good Intentions falls into this popular subgenre with a bit of a twist: what if one of these friends doesn’t really want to be friends at all?

On the surface, Cady has it all: a thriving event-planning business, a gorgeous home, and a successful husband who adores her. Her entire world shatters when her identical twin sister, Dana, dies in a car crash. Cady feels lost without Dana, her closest friend in the entire world, but when a kind woman in the hospital waiting room comforts her, despite losing her own twelve-year-old son on the same day, Cady feels a spark of hope. Maybe this woman, Morgan, can provide the love and comfort she needs.

Everything begins to spiral out of control as Cady orchestrates more and more events to get closer to Morgan, following her to her grief counseling group, going out for coffee dates, and even stalking Morgan outside her house, watching her for hours. Cady loses interest in her job, her husband, her life, all for Morgan. As the obsession deepens and Cady’s family begins to take notice, Cady feels herself latching onto Morgan even tighter, unwilling to lose the one thing she feels is giving her life purpose: helping Morgan get over her grief.

Cady is such a fascinating character. She is not likable in the slightest, and yet, I did still find myself rooting for her to find her footing and make better choices. She is horrifically insecure in all of her relationships, and she’s prone to wild mood swings where she’ll lash out at those around her. As is implied by the title, Cady masks every single one of her violations under six different layers of “good intentions,” but it’s obvious to the reader, and on some level to Cady herself, that these are actually bids for control, not connection.

Cady wants to connect with Morgan, not because she sees Morgan as an actual person, but because she sees Morgan as a means to an end. Cady wants connection, Cady wants friendship, Cady wants and wants, but she never really considers what Morgan wants. She’ll often even disregard what Morgan is actually saying, believing that she knows what is best for Morgan. She also often frames her actions as doing things for Morgan’s benefit, when they’re really for Cady’s. She both wants to use Morgan as a replacement for Dana, and also “fix” Morgan’s grief over her son. It feels like if she can “fix” Morgan, everything can go back to the way it was before, just with Morgan in Dana’s place.

Morgan was very interesting to me. I think that she occupies a unique space that I haven’t seen a lot of other characters in this genre occupy. Typically, I see two kinds of women that are the “object of obsession” in the obsessed female friendship genre. There’s the knowing, dominant leader who knows of the main character’s obsession and takes advantage of it to accomplish her own wants and goals. Then, there’s the naïve, sweet, unaware object who has no idea how far the main character would actually go for them. Morgan is neither. At first, she comes across as a little bit overly cautious, despite Cady not crossing too many boundaries yet. She’s a bit standoffish, not necessarily unfriendly but uninterested in friendship with Cady. It’s almost like she can tell that something is wrong with Cady’s feelings toward her.

Over and over, Morgan ignores her instincts because Cady is gaslighting and bread crumbing her. Cady will reveal information about herself that makes her look bad, but not dangerous, and Morgan will have some relief because THIS is clearly the thing that Cady was hiding. That’s why she was uncomfortable to be around. Then, Cady will escalate, and Morgan’s distrust and suspicion will return. She knows deep down that something is wrong, but because Cady appears to be honest, she convinces herself to ignore these feelings.

I liked how smart Morgan was. It made the atmosphere even more tense because any time Cady messed up, Morgan would pick up on it. Any time she misremembered her lies, Morgan remembered. It created a great back-and-forth between them, and I liked that Morgan wasn’t just willing to bend to Cady’s will. With such an intense character, it would be easy to have her capitulate to the intensity, but Morgan has an iron backbone. Cady does manage to brow beat her into agreeing to some things she didn’t want to, but Morgan does often come out on top, which leaves even more room for Cady to spiral.

The other characters in the story take a bit of a backseat to this relationship, understandably so, but I did still like them and appreciate their parts in the story. Matt especially provides a good amount of conflict because he sees the most of Cady’s behavior and is the most likely to call it out. Their relationship is manipulative on both sides, but as the story goes on, it becomes apparent that Matt is less “manipulating” and more trying to “manage” Cady’s emotions. It’s still not a “chill” thing to do, but it’s more understandable. Her family, Matt included, has had to learn to carefully navigate around her because of her intensity, and Matt thinks he’s doing the right thing by trying to avoid triggering her. I ended up liking his character quite a bit, despite his abysmal communication skills. It became more tolerable as Cady’s manipulation became more apparent.

The writing is fairly good, though I don’t think that the prose was used for much deeper effect. There were a few nice quotes here and there, but I thought for the most part the writing was fairly utilitarian. It was there to explain what was happening and what Cady was thinking, not to delve very deeply into descriptions.

I quite liked this quote, though:

“At some point, despite your good intentions, the instinct to survive kicks in, and you claw for that last piece of the fraying thread for yourself.”

Good Intentions (2026)

It’s evocative, and it provides a good metaphor for the way Cady approaches relationships. If you don’t get your part, someone else will, so you have to act without regard for others.

This is a slower-paced book because the plot is generally less important than the character and specifically the relationship between Cady and Morgan. There are some elements that maintain the sense of mystery, most specifically around Matt. Cady is unsure if Matt is having an affair, and she uncovers some suspicious things about his business; and while these elements are interesting, they are very much a subplot compared to the main story. The tension between Morgan and Cady is so well done I was cringing in my seat. At times it was extremely obvious that Morgan didn’t want to be around Cady, and as a reader, I was begging Cady to get the hint. However, there are times when the two women are building a genuine connection, and I appreciated the push and pull that the author incorporated into the story. It placed the reader in the position that Cady was in where sometimes things were good, tender, and sweet, and sometimes they were cold, awkward, and tense.

The ways that Cady tries to get closer to Morgan are genuinely horrific at points, but I think the author did such a great job writing her internal monologue that I never felt taken out of the story. It would’ve been very easy to make Cady this unredeemable monster, but she is still humanized, and that makes the relationships much more complex.

While the pacing of the book is rather slow, the escalation in the social rules that Cady is breaking does have momentum and pushes the story forward. The tension does rise every time Cady lies to her husband, makes Morgan uncomfortable, or allows another part of her life slip through her fingers. I never felt like I was losing interest in the story, and it never felt like the story was dragging or wallowing in certain plot points. I was thoroughly enjoying seeing where the story might go, but I found myself ending up a bit conflicted.

I’m not sure how I felt about the “big twist” at the end of the story. It logically made sense and was well foreshadowed throughout the rest of the story, but it did weaken some of the ways that Cady’s character had been built up so far. I went back and forth on whether I wanted to discuss this because I am not a mental health professional and I am not qualified to diagnose anyone with mental illnesses. I think I will mention it briefly, but if an expert has a different opinion, please defer to them.

The behaviors that Cady displays for much of the story are in line with some of the traits of people with Borderline Personality Disorder. According to the Mayo Clinic:

Symptoms may include:

• A strong fear of abandonment. This includes going to extreme measures so you’re not separated or rejected, even if these fears are made up.
• A pattern of unstable, intense relationships, such as believing someone is perfect one moment and then suddenly believing the person doesn’t care enough or is cruel.
• Quick changes in how you see yourself. This includes shifting goals and values, as well as seeing yourself as bad or as if you don’t exist.
• Periods of stress-related paranoia and loss of contact with reality. These periods can last from a few minutes to a few hours.
• Impulsive and risky behavior, such as gambling, dangerous driving, unsafe sex, spending sprees, binge eating, drug misuse, or sabotaging success by suddenly quitting a good job or ending a positive relationship.
• Threats of suicide or self-injury, often in response to fears of separation or rejection.
• Wide mood swings that last from a few hours to a few days. These mood swings can include periods of being very happy, irritable or anxious, or feeling shame.
• Ongoing feelings of emptiness.
• Inappropriate, strong anger, such as losing your temper often, being sarcastic or bitter, or physically fighting.

This list of symptoms describes very well the way that Cady interacts with the world, often leading from a place of insecurity or fear about her standing with the people around her. There’s also a part of BPD where the person with BPD has a “favorite person,” meaning a person whom an individual with BPD will rely on for most of their support and reassurance. Cady is demonstrated to have had several “favorite people” over the course of her life and story, and it informs the way she treats them. Dana was her first, her inseparable twin. Then it was Matt, her first love. Now it’s Morgan.

These are the ways Medical News Today describes how a person with BPD would act around their “favorite person:”

• frequently seeking the person’s approval or guidance
• feeling abandoned if the individual is unavailable or unresponsive
• fluctuating between extreme admiration and dismissal of the FP, also known as “splitting“
• attempting to please or adapt to the FP’s desires to maintain closeness
• feeling increasingly anxious about the FP leaving them
• feeling as though they cannot live without them

Again, I’m not necessarily trying to diagnose Cady with anything. I think that it’s almost always a better idea to avoid putting a distinct label on your characters with mental illness to avoid stigmatizing a real psychological disorder. I’m only really pointing this out because of the twist.

Cady doesn’t latch onto Morgan for no reason, and because there is a reason behind the obsession, it becomes less of a portrait of grief and more of a generic thriller. It made sense to me, without the twist, why Cady would latch onto this woman, and I found the lack of a specific reason more compelling! Providing a much more literal reason for the attachment robs the story and the character of some of their nuances. It also almost presents this idea that if Cady just got what she wanted from Morgan, then the spell and the attachment would be broken, and if Cady really is a character with BPD, that reads as a little bit off. Most of the story leads the reader to believe that Cady simply wants the connection with Morgan, but really she wants something more tangible. It changes the relationship between Cady and Morgan to make it drastically dissimilar to those of Cady and her previous “favorite people,” even though the rest of the book up until this point had intentionally been trying to draw parallels. I’m not sure if I’m able to express what I’m trying to say properly here; I apologize. I think I’m trying to say that instead of the character’s actions being in line with the mental illness they are (mostly) established to have, and therefore something that is a part of the mentality of the character, instead those action are based on an outside event.

The way that Cady ends up at the end of the story also made me feel very conflicted. It’s not a controversial opinion that Cady did numerous horrible, villainous actions throughout the story, not the least of which is the rampant stalking, and yet, she ends up in a better position than most would probably expect her to. On one hand, there was a certain satisfaction in seeing someone, even a very unlikable character, climb out of this extremely deep hole they had made for themselves. On the other, with the twist at the end, it is extremely obvious that Cady does not deserve this life that she now has. If it had been left a little bit more ambiguous, I think the feeling of the ending could be a bit more ambiguous. Instead, I feel a bit betrayed by this ending. The book spends a good amount of time showing Cady getting better, only to pull the rug.

I will say, I did see the twist coming. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. A twist should be foreshadowed, otherwise it feels cheap, but as soon as I figured out what was going on, I sighed and felt disappointed. Still, even after nearly a month, I can’t quite pin down my feelings except to say I don’t think the twist was necessary. I’m sure a TON of readers loved it! I just can’t bring myself to do the same.

I would definitely recommend Good Intentions, as long as the reader understands that Cady is a deeply unlikable, flawed protagonist. If you’re the kind of reader who needs to root for the main character, you are going to have a hard time with this one because it is very difficult to root for Cady. If you enjoy books that explores grief, guilt, and the lengths that some people will go to hold on to people they should let go, I think Good Intentions is a book for you.

Also, I’d like to note that this cover is a BOP. I really like the symbolism of the pure white flower having its roots entangled with the red “corrupted” flower. I can totally see the artist’s intention here with following the themes of the story; the intentions were bad, selfish, and evil from the start, regardless of what Cady is trying to tell herself.

Trigger warnings:

Pregnancy, miscarriage, death of a child, grief, animal death, stalking, infertility, alcohol, toxic friendship, gaslighting, car accident.

Does the Dog Die?

Yes, the dog does die. He’s a very lovable elderly Labrador or Golden Retriever, and I apologize but I can’t remember his name. Buddy, maybe? He is missing for a good portion of the book, and he is discovered to have been hit by a car and killed.