Review: "Our Best Intentions" by Vibhuti Jain

Quick Summary

Type: Novel

Genre: Mystery, thriller, contemporary

Back Cover: "Babur “Bobby” Singh, single parent and owner of fledging Uber business “Move with Bobby,” remains ever hopeful about ascending the ladder of American success. He lives in an affluent suburb of New York with his daughter Angie, an introverted teenager who is uncomfortable in her own skin unless she’s swimming.

During summer break, Angie is walking home after training at the high school pool when she finds Henry McCleary, a classmate from a wealthy, prominent family, stabbed and bleeding on the football field. The police immediately focus their investigation on Chiara Thompkins, a runaway Black girl who disappears after the stabbing and—it’s later discovered—wasn’t properly enrolled in the public high school.

The incident sends shock waves through the community and reveals jarring truths about the lengths to which families will go to protect themselves. As the town fractures, Angie must navigate conflicting narratives and wrestle with her own moral culpability. Meanwhile, Babur’s painstaking efforts to shield Angie and protect his hard-earned efforts to assimilate overshadow his ability to see right from wrong."

Read Time: 4 days

Rating: 2.75 stars

Review

I think this novel's biggest weakness was that I went into it with the wrong expectations. I thought I would be getting a mystery in which a normal girl who witnessed a crime but wasn't completely sure about what she witnessed tried to figure out what she had seen and where the missing girl was from. Instead, I got a contemporary work exploring race in an upper-class suburb. That's not saying that a story like that is inherently bad, but it wasn't what I was sold and that made it disappointing. From the beginning, it was clear that the boy who was attacked was actually the aggressor, and that the missing girl was innocent/acted in self-defense. In fact, it was a little frustrating to wait for the main characters to catch up to what was so obvious to readers from the start.

On top of that, I was sad that Chiara died, and especially that she died in the way she did. I understand having a story that ends with the most realistic scenario, but the way Chiara died actually didn't feel realistic. And it would have been a little nice to have a hopeful ending for her, since no one else (except for the super rich kids) got happy endings.

Overall, the story wasn't bad, but it wasn't great, fell into a lot of the pitfalls a lot of debuts fall into, and was not what I was hoping for in terms of genre, which led to me feeling disappointed and a little lied to (not necessarily by the author, but definitely by the publisher).