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The Best of Good
by Sarah Lewis

Reviewed by Christine Westwater
copyright 2004
All Rights Reserved

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The Best of Good by Sarah Lewis is about Good, a bartender in his late 40’s. He’s lived most of his life as an emotional and social hermit due to his brother’s death when Good was just 15. He survives the first few years after his brother’s death by creating a rock band that ends up really taking off and making him, and his band, famous. Then he dropped out of it all and became a bartender at a live music club; the same club that he’s still a bartender at as this story opens. Good finds out that an ex-girlfriend has a 10 year old son who "looks just like" Good. This is the first thing that sets Good’s life on a path thoroughly divergent from his life for the last 30 years. Somehow, with the knowledge that his DNA is running around in some kid, Good starts to become a man who is able to connect emotionally and who can share himself, his run down apartment, his music, and learn to love.

Ms. Lewis provides the reader with plenty of details of Good, his patterns, his desires. She provides a lot of good images to put the reader in the moment. At first, he knowingly acts the part of the person he thinks he is supposed to be. Gradually, he becomes the man he wants to be and casts of his undesirable attitudes and habits. It was fascinating to read as Good took the steps through this metamorphosis. You see his utter terror to do things that are outside his normal routine, and then the slow acclimation to doing things that are not normal.

However, because Good is so emotionally empty in the beginning, I never felt like I truly connected with him. I connected more with his sister, Cathy, and his love interest, Robin, than I did with him. He is an interesting guy, but not anyone that I have any feelings for. I kept reading this story in the hope that I would being to care for him more, but instead I only cared about the effect he had on others and the thoughts and moments he had.

Generally, I liked this book. I think it was true and clear. Ms. Lewis uses good imagery to draw the reader into the moment, and provides a good look at San Diego. There are only two areas of improvement that I see for this book. First, I wish that Good was more emotionally available to me as a reader. I wonder if part of his emotional unavailability is due to Ms. Lewis writing in first person for a man, or perhaps it is my reading as a woman that distances me from Good. Secondly, I think that Ms. Lewis took an easy route with her ending for the book. It cleans up to tidily. I suggest that Ms. Lewis delete the last paragraph from Chapter 45 and all of Chapter 46 in any further revisions of this book. I think the reader only needs to know the first step to The Best of Good, instead of what is The Best of Good.

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