PositiveTimes Literary Supplement\"Bad Bad Girl is a daughter’s attempt to comprehend her fraught relationship with an emotionally closed mother. This is a fictionalized memoir (in Jen’s words, a \'forged truth\') that yearns to resolve a painful question: how to grieve a mother who abdicated her responsibility to be one. For her answer, Jen fills in the mysteries of Loo’s life with a novelist’s sensibility ... What unfolds more broadly is a tale of intergenerational drama, as Jen attempts to reconcile the scars of her childhood with those of her mother...The playful, witty account of Loo’s early life, which dominates the first half, gives way to Jen’s recollections of her own childhood in the second ... In the novel’s closing pages, the writer’s grief – not only for her dead mother, but for the relationship they never had – erupts on the page, the polished prose replaced by something rawer.\
