50 pages • 1 hour read
Alice FeeneyGood Bad Girl: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 39-53Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 39 Summary: “Edith”
Edith goes to the place where her old house once was but discovers it’s now an apartment building. She runs into Clio, who figured that Edith would come here. Clio divulges that she and Jude sold Edith’s old house, which is how Clio has paid for Edith’s stay in the home. Clio also reveals that she paid Patience to take care of Edith in the home, to give Jude updates on Edith, and to get Edith out of the home. Edith asks if the police have been to see Clio yet—not about Edith’s disappearance but about the murder. Edith says that she was there when the murder happened.
Chapter 40 Summary: “Frankie”
Frankie returns to her houseboat and finds a voicemail from her daughter, who explains that she’s been taken in by an officer named Chapman—the same detective who came to the houseboat earlier. Frankie decides that she needs to go to the police station and “confess to what she did” (188).
Chapter 41 Summary: “Clio”
Clio and Edith take the bus to Clio’s house. Edith is prickly and judgmental of Clio’s various lifestyle choices—from her desire to keep Dickens off the furniture to her veganism. Clio tells her mother that Patience was arrested in connection to Joy’s murder, and Edith says that they must go to the police immediately because Patience’s arrest is all her fault.
Chapter 42 Summary: “Frankie”
Frankie arrives at the police station and asks for Charlotte Chapman, telling the man at the front desk that she has something to confess. She’s turned away because it’s late at night and Charlotte isn’t in. As she’s leaving, she sees someone enter the police station whom she never expected to see.
Chapter 43 Summary: “The End: Mother’s Day, Twenty Years Earlier”
The unnamed woman who lost the baby returns to the home where she’s living, where it is revealed that she isn’t the baby’s mother; she was merely watching her grandchild that day while the baby’s mother—Clio—was at home. The narrator, now revealed to be Edith, has spent these past months helping care for the child while Clio coped with her postpartum depression. She now tells Clio what happened, and Clio responds by telling Edith to get out of the house, saying she never wants to have contact with her again.
Chapter 44 Summary: “Edith”
In Clio’s home, Edith goes to the lost child’s room and finds a box of newspaper clippings. The kidnapping was initially a prominent news story but eventually fell out of public interest despite Clio having offered a £10,000 reward for information leading to the child’s safe return. Edith reflects that she used to call the child “Ladybug” because of her freckles, which is why she uses the same nickname for Patience. She resolves to go to the police to see if she can free Patience, whom she believes to be innocent.
Chapter 45 Summary: “Patience”
At night in her cell, Patience reflects on the fight with her mother that led to her running away. Frankie had promised to show Patience her birth certificate on her 18th birthday, but when the day finally came, Frankie refused. In the ensuing fight, Frankie revealed that she is not Patience’s biological mother but refused to say anything further about who Patience is or where she came from, so Patience fled.
Chapter 46 Summary: “Edith”
Edith goes to the police station and asks for Charlotte. The man at the front desk tries to turn her away for the same reason he turned Frankie away, but Edith insists, telling him that she was present when Joy’s murder was committed.
Chapter 47 Summary: “Frankie”
Frankie sees Edith, whom she recognizes, entering the police station. She doesn’t understand why Edith is here, especially since she tried to see Edith yesterday in the home to “tell her exactly what she thought of her” (217). Joy stopped Frankie while the latter was on her way to see Edith, and Frankie told Joy that she was Clio. Joy, who had just spoken to Clio, called Frankie out on the lie, and Frankie responded by telling her to “drop dead”—the incriminating insult overhead by Mr. Henderson that was attributed to the real Clio.
Frankie now drives to Clio’s house and is about to enter when she hears something break inside, followed by a scream.
Chapter 48 Summary: “Clio”
Clio wakes to a car’s headlights down the street and a noise from downstairs. She initially assumes the noise is Edith, but then she sees that Edith is in bed. She grabs a metal lamp to use as a weapon and sees that the front door is open. She hears someone moving in her consulting room and, upon seeing who it is, runs toward them screaming.
Chapter 49 Summary: “Edith”
Edith finally gets to speak to Charlotte. She tells Charlotte that the detective has the case all wrong and that the baby who was stolen all those years ago actually is Patience, who didn’t commit Joy’s murder. She also tells Charlotte that Clio had a funeral service for her stolen child even though the child never died. She then goes on to tell Charlotte that her theory regarding Joy’s murder is wrong because Charlotte has not considered all possible motives. She mentions her deceased friend from the home, May, who used to be a detective. May had a theory that someone in the home was making deals to kill elderly residents. Charlotte asks if Edith knows May’s surname, but Edith doesn’t.
Chapter 50 Summary: “Frankie”
Frankie rushes into Clio’s house after hearing the scream and finds Clio in her consulting room brandishing a lamp at a dog sitting in a chair. Clio asks Frankie what she’s doing in her house in the middle of the night, and Frankie finally tells Clio the truth that she’s wanted to divulge for so long: She was the one who took Clio’s baby.
Chapter 51 Summary: “Clio”
Clio, who can’t even remember Frankie’s name and just thinks of her as a client, doesn’t initially believe Frankie. Frankie insists that the baby she stole and Clio have the same eyes, so she shows Clio a picture of the baby she stole—Patience. This confuses Clio even further, who now thinks that Frankie and Patience are con artists trying to extort her. While Frankie is in the house, Clio receives a call from Charlotte, who tells her that Edith came to the police station but had a health incident and is in the hospital.
Chapter 52 Summary: “Frankie”
Clio and Frankie drive together to the hospital. Frankie tries to convince Clio that Patience is really her daughter, but Clio refuses to believe her, telling Frankie that she feels in her heart that her daughter died. Frankie gives Clio an envelope that she claims contains definitive proof.
Chapter 53 Summary: “Clio”
Clio sees her mother in the hospital. She’s told by the doctor that Edith had a heart problem while in the police station and probably only has a few hours left to live.
Chapters 39-53 Analysis
This section of the novel deals heavily with the truth of various characters’ backstories. One revelation is the identity of the unnamed first-person narrator. Feeney amplifies the effect of this twist by Reimagining the Expectations of Motherhood. The novel encourages readers to assume that the unnamed first-person narrator must be Clio; she does, after all, refer to the child as “the baby,” and she is the one carting the child around the supermarket. Societal expectations of motherhood dictate that the mother is primarily—if not solely—responsible for a child’s well-being. However, this expectation doesn’t take into account the many realities of motherhood, such as the postpartum depression that Clio experiences. The reveal that it was Edith who was with the child when she was abducted implicitly asks the reader to question their own assumptions about what motherhood looks like and what should be expected of mothers.
The chapters narrated by the unnamed first-person narrator are the only parts of the novel that are told in self-contained flashbacks. Feeney otherwise incorporates characters’ histories by having characters reflect on their past during the narrative present; for example, Patience recalls the events leading to her choice to leave home because her surroundings in the prison jog these memories. This narrative technique allows Feeney to maintain narrative momentum and avoid further complicating the already complex, multi-perspectival structure of the novel. More than this, the insertion of memories into present-day scenes allows Feeney to draw parallels between the events of past and present. In Chapter 45, for instance, the fact that Patience remembers this particular moment while in prison implies that she felt trapped and isolated when Frankie refused to reveal her biological parentage.
Feeney incorporates one additional means of surfacing the past in this section. In Chapter 44, Edith reads through a series of newspaper clippings that Clio collected after Patience/Nellie’s abduction. These clippings allow Feeney to integrate information about the abduction that might not organically surface in any of the characters’ narration, such as the fact that the CCTV footage of the kidnapper was grainy and couldn’t be used to identify any of their attributes. The progression of the clippings—from in-depth coverage of the kidnapping to a brief afterthought of an article a year after the incident—also helps explain why Clio and Edith reacted to the aftermath of the child’s abduction as they did. The initial voyeuristic verve with which the press covered the kidnapping suggests the societal pressures that would have deepened Clio’s sense that she was a “bad mother”; the public’s eye was on her, and she became defined by this tragedy in both society’s mind and her own. The slow progression of the clippings also speaks to how quickly sensationalized stories slip from the public’s view and how Clio—after so many months of scrutiny—eventually had to suffer her sorrow in isolation. The incorporation of backstory through this medium enables Feeney to depict the past through another lens, adding different insights into what really happened and thus into the characters themselves, further suggesting The Plurality of Identity.
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By Alice Feeney
