Let’s Skip to the Good Part

The good part in life. Where you’re living out your wildest dreams and finally have that picket white fence house with the garden you always talked about, filled with homegrown tomatoes, an orange tree and heck, even bananas, why not? Or living it up in a spacious flat in New York City where you get to read books for a living and travel to Germany for the Frankfurt Book Fair because you have a thrilling career in publishing. Instead of putting up with a threatening letter from your landlord because you placed a houseplant outside your overpriced flat’s patio for some much-needed sun and you’re so broke and far from having any resemblance of a career, you begin wondering if you need to be born again to start over. Or wait, is that just me?

Whatever your dreams, I’m sure if you were offered the chance to rewind time and fix your mistakes to drastically alter your present, you’d take it. I know, I would. But what if you have no desire in the past or present moment and simply want to skip to the part of your life where you have everything you’ve ever fantasized of? The ideal career, partner, and a gorgeous bookshelf to house all your lovely books?

A dream come true, right?

I’d say so. Why not? In a heartbeat, I’d trade my current reality for a future one where I never have to swipe through another soul crushing dating app. But Sophie Cousens, being the brilliant writer that she is, shows us in her 338-page latest novel ‘The Good Part’, why it might not be the picture-perfect solution regardless of how shitty your life is that you’re begging a wishing machine for a change.

And to be careful what you wish for.

Lucy Young is twenty-six years old and her life sucks. No, really, it does. She lives in a crowded flat in London (but hey, at least it’s London) with inconsiderate roommates who use her hidden stash of toilet paper and a leaking ceiling coming from her upstairs neighbor’s faulty bathroom floor tiles that has her waking up in a drenched bed. At work, things aren’t any better. She’s underappreciated and while she’s technically been “promoted” from runner to junior researcher at When TV, she’s still fetching croissants and at the bottom of the TV chain. Life is definitely not going according to plan. So, when her best friend and roommate Zoya, the one person who makes her living conditions bearable announces she’s moving out and Lucy has yet another depressing date, she finds herself wishing on a wishing machine to skip to the good part in her life. The part where she’s got her shit together, a career and someone who loves her. And the next day, she wakes up to find her wish has been granted.