4/5. Read this back in 2017 and did not review it back then. I don't remember enough about it to give it proper feedback.

From the synopsis I thought this was going to be a really good read. A highly respected teacher is accused of inappropriate behavior with students and he says he is being set up. Sounds like a Lifetime movie perhaps but I was prepared to get whisked away into the drama of the story.

This book really goes nowhere fast. George tells his wife at the beginning that he was told he is being set up but the reader us never told the details of the how and why. The book could have been soooo much better had the reader been provided with details so we could make a decision or assumption as to whether George was set up or a pervert.

Sadie and Jimmy's relationship didn't seem realistic to me and Jimmy's mom just seemed oblivious to everything though she was written to be very in the know and supportive of what the kids were doing. Besides this I just found Sadie unlikable.

The writing was decent although some details seemed outdated. So at times I wondered if the story was present day or in the past though the 90s were referenced as the past.

All in all this book was ok but had the potential to be so much better. Details were needed and more depth to the story.

Characters and well fleshed out and dimensional. A little wordy and could have been shorter. What really happened, Unsettling for sure

It was hard for me to finish this one. I enjoyed the beginning immensely, but the last half of the book was slow and uninteresting. The premise had so much potential, but ultimately this just fell flat for me.

This was a very well-written book that explores loyalty to family. This is a good look at an all-American family with struggles and questions of love and loyalty.

Did not finish. I wanted to like this book but the writing style just was not compatible with my taste.

Loved the book! Read it very fast. Had a few problems with the believability of some characters. In particular, I couldn't really 'buy' Sadie. Nonetheless, enjoyed the book. Interesting perspective on a riveting but uncomfortable subject. Will make you ask yourself what you believe.

Here is a link to my Youtube review: https://youtu.be/KhW7xRJhlx0

This book started so strong and I was really into it. Then it just dragged on and became a character driven book, all about the many ways George’s arrest and the allegations against him affected his family. I was honestly starting to wonder if we would ever find out if George did it or not, that’s how long this dragged on. The ending was also extremely unsatisfying. The idea for this book was interesting and timely and the writing was great, but it just felt like it lost its way over the chapters.

I'm late to the party, obviously, but this was an interesting book I'll be thinking about for quite a while.

I ended up getting to this one much later than I anticipated but WOW! A quiet but equally intense family drama that stirred up so many emotions for me - I couldn’t put it down.

Thank you to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for this reader's copy. In exchange, I am providing an honest review.

What happens when a beloved person in a small town is accused of heinous things? What happens to the family of that person? The colleagues of that person? The accusers? The outliers? This is the story of what could happen.

George Woodbury, a beloved town figure and teacher at the local prep school, has been accused of inappropriate interactions with underage girls, including rape. His family is shell-shocked, there's just no way George could have done this. But why would the girls lie? At first, George's family rallies around him and defends his innocence but the longer his incarceration stretches out while waiting for trial the more they begin to wonder if he's guilty and if they know him, if they have ever known him. The town is divided, the school is divided, and George's family is divided.

Sadie, George's daughter, flees her home for the refuge of her boyfriend's house and feels unmoored. Joan, George's wife, vacillates between belief in her husband's innocence and his guilt. Andrew, George's husband, comes back to the town he grew up in and hates to support his family, and struggles to resolve his past with his present.

I was digging this book until the epilogue. It ended abruptly and felt unfinished considering the rest of the book. Part of that might be the need for answers and Whittall provides none. She leaves the reader hanging as to the innocence or guilt of George Woodbury. I want to be okay with that because real life doesn't always give clear answers. The result of lack of clarity is that people have to live with the choices they make and find a way forward.

Story really got me thinking. How would I react if my husband, neighbor or co-worker was accused of such awful acts. Would I stand by them or assume the worse.

Great book!

This topic is pretty pertinent to today's times. I felt like there could have been less info shared (teenage daughter's sex life in detail). Definitely not a favorite storyline for me, but I would give the author another read.

Great story, poorly written. As the family deals with a fathers inappropriate actions with 3 high school girls, the reader falls asleep. The end.

There were a few good chapters in there, but then I was tempted to quit from boredom.

Oooh, boy. This is ripped from the headlines, Law & Order SVU (but behind the scenes), crazy intense, and important. The Best Kind of People goes in depth, into the ramifications of sexual misconduct accusations. From the moment the claim is made, each person in the accused's orbit is affected in a million ways, minute and myriad. I wasn't very fond of the actual characters, but I don't think the author's intent was to make them sympathetic. It was more to crack each one of them open and see what oozed out. I personally thought this was a very timely and interesting story, although I don't know if this book is for everyone. There are some explicit details throughout.
3 stars

*I received a review copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.
Thank you to Ballantine Books and Netgalley.*

Meh. I barely remember this book at this point, beyond the spoiled family (they lived on a lake, right?) and I think I really liked how vindicating the ending was, like they were all trying to make for a better situation. I don't remember whether the parents stayed together, and I appreciate that I think the reader never actually knows whether George did what he was accused of - it felt more real that way, and you were left in the same situation as everyone else, not as an Omniscient Reader but as a regular observer. Everything seemed to happen as one would expect; it felt like a very real story. I appreciated how the whole family was tracked, how you watched the reactions of not just the wife but the teenage children (and the town). Overall, an enjoyable & fascinating read, but nothing I'll necessarily keep with me for the rest of my life, I guess.

This is one of the best books I’ve read in a while. The characters are fascinating and have dimension. The author builds suspense about the crime, but even more so about the affects on family members and others. I highly recommend this book.

In Zoe Whittall’s topical book The Best Kind of People, George Woodbury is a middle-aged married, respected exclusive preparatory school science teacher who inherited money, a lot of money, from his father. He has a claim to fame as the Connecticut teacher who took down a school shooter, so when he’s accused and subsequently arrested on criminal charges which include attempted rape of several underage girls, his story is BIG news. With George locked up awaiting trial, his wife, local trauma nurse, Joan, his teenage daughter Sadie, and his son Andrew have to deal with the fallout.

The novel begins with George and Joan enjoying a quiet evening at home when he tells her he’s been receiving anonymous “cryptic” notes in his school mailbox and that the school secretary warns him there’s a rumor he’s “being set up.” Within minutes, police come to the home and George is arrested on charges of “sexual misconduct with four minors, [and] attempted rape of a minor.” What then follows is a nightmare for George’s family. The Woodburys live in the most exclusive gated community in town, but reporters flock outside the gates, snapping photos as family members leave and return. Excrement, eggs and broken beer bottles are thrown over the hedges. Sadie is cruelly harassed at school, and Andrew, now a lawyer who lives in New York with his lover, Jared, returns to help. Joan’s acerbic, fiercely single sister Clara also descends on the home. At first, the family think George’s arrest is a mix up which will be quickly sorted out, but hours turn to days, and weeks turn to months….

We follow the family members as they each go through the process of learning about, and dealing with the accusations. Much of the book’s focus is on Sadie, the 17-year-old who is experimenting with sex through her relationship with her boyfriend, Jimmy, but then later she begins to have feelings for an older man who (stupidly) sends her all the wrong signals. And of course, ‘misreading signals’ or sending ‘wrong signals’ are trip wires in male-female relationships. There are those in Avalon Hills who think George’s accusers just outright lied, and those who defend George wonder if the girls somehow ‘got it wrong.’

In high school, Andrew had a sexual relationship with an older married coach. Andrew was 17 at the time, and in his mind, nothing criminal occurred. Returning to Avalon Falls brings that affair back into focus, and it tends to make Andrew more open to the possibility that his father is guilty of the charges, or at the very least, that he has have a secret life that no one knows about.

Although the novel concerns the Woodburys in the community, there are really only a handful of characters to worry about here. Perhaps the cleverest addition character wise is Kevin, a one time ‘hot’ author who is floundering on his second novel. He lives with (and off) Jimmy’s mother, Elaine. He comes to the conclusion that George is guilty as there was something off about the man–a total lack of self-awareness and also he was a little too perfect:

George always struck Kevin as an intimidating figure, who was nonetheless approachable and jovial. He used to joke about him with Elaine, that he didn’t seem real. He’d seemed too perfect, too good a husband, not enough darkness.

On the opposite side of the fence, the school secretary Dorothy is an activist with a men’s movement which boasts slogans such as: Just because you regret it doesn’t mean it’s rape. One of the members thinks that George “is a symbol of all that feminism has done to cause hysteria in this world.”

Inappropriate sexual behaviour is at the core of the story. We come to news stories with opinions, past experiences and beliefs. We’re human–it’s what we do, and so everyone in Avalon Hills, Connecticut has an opinion (his wife had to know, the girls involved are slutty, etc). Even withholding opinion (as in ‘innocent until proven guilty’) is still taking sides. as far as the residents are concerned. The case is like a storm that whips everybody’s opinions out into the open; the case is no longer about the victims, or George and what he may or may not have done.

There was a lot I liked about the novel; It’s well-nuanced. Loved the loaded ‘support’ Joan receives. A basket of fruit and a card from the nurses at Joan’s work is delivered shortly after the news of George’s arrest becomes public knowledge:

The card read, I hope you’re hanging in there, and it was signed by all the nurses at work. Accompanying it were a pamphlet for victims’ services, one for a support group for women survivors of violence, and another for a group of women with loved ones in prison.

I sometimes think of news reports that interview neighbours who live next to a suspected pedo. Do you want to be the one who goes on camera saying you always knew there was something weird about him? Or would you rather say he seemed normal and you noticed nothing?

Could have done without the details of Sadie’s sex life–that’s not a prudish comment just an observation. She’s a major character and since some of her father’s accusers are her age (or younger) she is impacted in a way her mother isn’t, but details about the blow jobs and the hands jobs were boring. I wished there had been more focus on Joan. Also, given the brevity of the charges, it seems highly unlikely that Joan wouldn’t have dug through the family finances from the moment George was carted from the house. Or perhaps that’s just me. Along that same line of thought, at one point, fairly deep into the novel, one of the characters mentally voices an opinion about the witness statements. Joan’s reaction to the evidence and witness statements is vague and never really addressed. Perhaps she doesn’t want to know, but for this reader this seemed manipulated to facilitate plot.

I read some comments from readers who thought the novel ended too abruptly. I didn’t have that reaction; I thought the understated ending was extremely powerful. The author succeeds in showing that no one walks away unchanged by this event.

review copy

Really enjoyable read. Good characters and a Good story. Well worth a read. Think others will enjoy.

This was my final book completed in 2019, and it was a great way to end the year.

The Best Kind of People shows the complexity of rape culture. It's easy to demonize not only the accused, but their family and friends. Whittall made me think about my preconceived notions and the judgments I make against others.

If you want your books to have nice, neat endings that feel fair and just, you may want to skip this one.