Kirsten King’s debut, A Good Person (Putnam 2026), opens with a bang: When I was ten years old, I nearly pushed a girl into a gorilla pen at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, Massachusetts. What follows is an unhinged first-person narration by a woman who, after being spurned by the man she was trying to make her boyfriend, drunkenly decides to hex him and ends up a suspect in his murder.
Make no mistake, Lillian is a narcissist with victim mentality and you don’t need the diagnosis to get there – the unreliable, unhinged first person narration readily points the way. The novel called Hooked to mind in how it dealt with obsession and also the role of social media. (Lillian creates a fake profile to stalk and harass people.)
I’m not going to spoil it because it’s a fun, dark ride. Let’s just say I don’t want to be left alone with Kirsten King – she might frighten me. Ha.
A Girl Named Tommi 