Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

The Good Girls is a compelling piece of investigative journalism that looks into the case of two girls who were found dead - hanging in their orchard. It is an often harrowing look at the way women are treated in parts of India. The lives of these two girls were cut brutally short for reasons that have their root in oppression, patriarchal societies and the whole concept of ‘honour’. The book’s scope is quite large with a huge cast of characters which does occasionally get a little confusing but it is a book full of poignancy that is an extremely vital read.

The Good Girls is the true account of the deaths of two teenage Indian girls who were found hanging in their families' orchard one morning. Sixteen year old Padma and her cousin, fourteen year old Lalli left the family home to go for a wee in the field and never returned. the next morning their bodies were found. They lived in a very small village where everyone knows everyone else and traditional values are still strongly upheld. The families of the girls didn't trust their local Police force to deal with the case and staged a sit in protest with the bodies, asking for Police to come from the bigger cities to work on the case. Their mistrust was legitimate as it turns out. The absolute lack of professional processes throughout the entire legal system from the Police Officers on the streets to the forensic science employed, and even to the autopsies was shocking and disgusting. The way things were handled there was no way that the truth about what happened was ever going to be discovered.
The author manages to use the case of Padma and Lalli to then look at the wider issues of women's rights and how women are viewed / treated within Indian society and how this can be drastically different in the smaller villages than it is in the bigger more modern cities.
This was actually a very difficult book to read not only because of the awful circumstances of what happened, but because the culture, relationships, family links, and ways of life in India is so different to what I know in my life the story has hard to follow at times. I did get a bit lost at times trying to follow who was who and how they fit in to the story as there's such a huge cast of characters. I've got to say, I think this isn't a very accessible nor would it be an appealing non-fiction to more general readers, which is a shame as it looks at a huge social issue that needs to be spoken about and addressed.

This is a truly compelling read that had me hooked from the first page!.
Throughout this story, the author takes us through a range of emotions, and you really feel as though you are a part of this story as it begins to unfold.
Full of intriguing characters, a well paced plot that is full of suspense and keeps you guessing right to the very end. This is certainly a book I will be telling my friends about!.

First of all, this book opens an important topic of mistreatment of women in India, corruption. It is an eye-opening book. However, for some reason, I could not really get in this book, it took me approximately 50 pages before I got immersed by the story.

I could not get into this book. I was so intrigued by the blurb as I love true crime but this was way too heavy for me to follow. I was intimidated by the amount of people in the cast list at the start which is always challenging when you're reading on a kindle, and I feel like the plot should have gripped me at the start and the research about the lifestyle could have been woven through it to keep me engaged.

The Good Girls is a powerful, heartrending and compelling work of investigative journalism from award winning author Sonia Faleiro.

On May 27th 2014, cousins and best friends 16 year old Padma* and 14 year old Lalli* went into the fields to relieve themselves before bedtime, as was their habit, and never returned. In the early hours of the morning their body’s were found hanging in the mango tree orchard belonging to their families in the tiny Indian village of Katra Sadatgani. And there they would remain for days as their family demanded justice.

* The girls’ names have been changed in accordance with Indian law which requires that the identity of victims of certain crimes remain private.

Drawing on official documents, news reports, and personal interviews, Faleiro attempts to piece together the events that led up to the girl’s deaths, and the extraordinary events that followed. Faleiro does her best to establish a timeline and unravel the often contradictory information that is a hallmark of this investigation. This is a complex case that involves a large number of people, and is forced to take into account issues of family structure, tradition, poverty, caste, religion, and political corruption to explain both its origin and its development.

The Good Girls is not the easiest of reads, from a position of western privilege it’s confronting to learn about the circumstances in which Padma and Lalli lived. This not only includes their immediate environs in a village with no running water, sanitation, or electricity, but also a society that considers them as little more than chattel.

Crimes against women, and girls, are ubiquitous in India, both in public and at home. Despite attempts to lawfully curb the violence (largely as a consequence of the ‘Delhi Bus Rape’ in 2012) when caste, tradition and religion insist that women are little more than the property of men, the law is often ignored, abetted by corrupt politicians and a venal police force who lack the skills, resources or motivation to investigate complaints.

To be honest I have little faith in the official findings in this case, given the falsehoods, contradictions, and grievous errors that dogged every step of the investigation. I don’t think any conclusion can be reached with confidence, but I appreciate Faleiro’s attempt to shed light on what happened to Padma and Lalli.

The Good Girls is a well written, disturbing yet fascinating narrative that provides insight not only into an individual tragedy, but also into a culture and a country. Incidentally I strongly suggest you don’t Google the case, or if you do be careful which articles you view as many are accompanied by a photo of the two girls hanging from the mango tree.

In 2014 two young teenage girls, fourteen-year-old Lalli and sixteen-year-old Padma, go missing one evening in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The girls were cousins and very close and had been to a local fair that day. A relative went to the families and told them that he had seen the girls talking to a boy from the next hamlet, and that he had been threatened with a gun and several men had taken the girls away. Their families went out looking for them, but their bodies were eventually found hanging from a tree in the orchard. What happened next sees witness stories changing and strange behaviour by some involved in the case, and it underlines the way in which different castes are treated in Indian society and by the law, and what seems like indifference of the system to crimes which mainly affect women and girls. All this is further complicated by the practice of honour killings.

This was an informative read especially if, like me, the reader knows little of the workings of law and society in India. It is a difficult read emotionally to find out what happened to the girls and the whole case is very sad. It feels as if rights for women and girls are going backwards in all areas of the world. The book did become a little unstructured at times and that affected my ability to concentrate on some areas, but it has left me feeling that I need to read more about the subjects involved, which is always a good thing.

Thank you to NetGalley and publishers, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (UK & ANZ), for the opportunity to read an ARC.

What a powerful and provocative read. I have never read a true crime novel before this one, and it was so haunting and upsetting. Sonia Faleiro brought the victims to the forefront of the novel, advocating for them with every word, whilst also critiquing the governmental systems set up that create issues for women.

Through this one case, Faleiro brings up decades of mistreatment to women in India, the broken caste system, and the corruption of the police and overall governmental systems. It was not just the story of two murdered girls, it was the story of decades of violence against women. Throughout this read, I gained such a deeper understanding of these issues as well as learning about the victims of these horrific crimes and the consequent implications. There was a lot of information packed into this one, and at times it was very graphic (unnecessarily so I would say), that it could be difficult to piece together the events of the case. However, I gained so much insight from this novel. Every word impacted and educated me and for that reason, I would highly recommend it.

It took me a while to realise that this book was a work of narrative non-fiction, and what made it a special read for me was that I couldn't find anything anywhere on the two young girls on the internet, meaning that it really did educate me. I didn't however find the reading experience as good as I could have as the prose itself seemed somewhat clipped, as though too many words had been edited out and at times I felt as though I was reading a summary of each chapter as opposed to the actual chapter. That being said, as with all non-fiction, the writing itself is not necessarily the most important part of the story it has to tell.

In 2014, two young girls from a village in Utar Pradesh were reported missing. Their bodies were later found hanging from a tree in a nearby orchard and their families refused to move them, proclaiming the girls raped and murdered.

In The Good Girls, Sonia Faleiro takes a look at the case of the girls she names Padma and Lalli and where everything went wrong with their case from the very start, from the moment they took too long to come back from the fields they used for their toilet. The book also acts as a lens into the way sexual assault is viewed in India, and how difficult it still is to fairly investigate and charge culprits for.

What I appreciated about this book is the real look it took into how girls are treated in India, and i particular the poorer villages and families in India. A girl's honor is everything - to the point that when it was deemed Padma and Lalli had most likely died by suicide, people thought to themselves, "well, how could they have LET themselves live" after certain aspects of the case and potential sexual relationships came to light.

"And so, just like that, in less than an hour since they were gone, Padma was no longer the quick-tempered one. Lalli was no longer the faithful partner in crime. Who they were, and what had happened to them, was already less important than what their disappearance meant to the status of the people left behind."

It also is such an eye-opener on how so many people still live today and it's heartbreaking. Truly. There were times I woudl forget these events only took place 6 years ago because the way people lived felt like decades, if not a century ago. The poverty, the lack of education, the stifling and control of young women (for example it's improper for a girl to talk on a mobile phone?!), was just so backward.

I don't think this book was structured as well as it could have been. It felt a bit all over the place for me at times but I do have to point out that the author was dealing with a lot of reports and information - of which there were a lot of contradictory statements (the main eyewitness changed his statement a number of times, and still doesn't really seem to know what he actually saw that night).

I'm honestly not 100% sure if I'd recommend it to everyone to read - I think some people will like and others will be turned off by how all over the place the story and the case is.

The Good Girls grips you from the first page. It makes you think, it makes you feel many emotions, as the story of the two girls unfolds.
It's a compelling and thought provoking read that leaves you questioning what you believe and think. The good Girls is a book that is one that would incite some interesting discussion in a book club and one which you will want to pass on to and discuss with friends and colleagues.

This non-fiction book follows the stories of two teenage girls in Uttar Pradesh, India in 2014, who disappeared one night and were found hanging from a tree the next morning. The family, having no faith in the local police, refused to allow the bodies to be taken down in order to gain national media attention and demand justice for their children. The ensuing months led to a battle on understanding the events that took place, and a focus on ideas of gender, sex, honour and violence throughout India.

This was a hauntingly sad case to read about which will leave you more informed on the position of women around the world and the gender oppression that has existed and still exists. The author uses this one case of Padma and Lalli as a way to illuminate larger issues of sexual violence, caste issues, and the problems of the corrupt and incompetent police force, medical field, and government.

The book reads almost like non-fiction with the way the story is unravelled. It really comes across that the author has covered all bases in terms of interviewing the family of the victims and the accused, the police, reporters, neighbours and extended family, the medical team and more. There is a lot of information throughout this book and it could be hard to comprehend with all the various names, politics, and places that were mentioned, but in a way, this felt like a reflection of the complexity of fixing the issues prevalent in India.

My heart broke for Padma and Lalli, but I came away from this book with a better understanding of the issues faced by women around the world. I was moved, hurt and angry, but I am more educated for it, and I would recommend this book to others on this basis.

A harrowing, sad, compelling and extremely well written account of the killing of 2 young girls.
This is difficult reading but taught me a lot about honour killings and the intricacies of tradition.