Good Intentions

by Jessy Wu

THE BIGGEST STORY WAS ALWAYS THE ONE BETWEEN THEM

In the cramped basement office of their university newspaper, Jake and Nadia break a huge story that exposes a decade of institutional corruption. In the quieter hours, they also fall in love.

Then Nadia leaves.

A decade later, she returns from New York, once a fast-rising finance hotshot, now exiled after a deal gone wrong. Back in Sydney, Jake has forged a reputation as a crusading reporter whose by-line regularly brings down the rich and powerful.

Battlelines are drawn when they're each pulled into the orbit of a biotech visionary whose startup becomes Nadia's big break and the target of Jake's latest investigation. As old wounds flare, both must decide how far they'll go to come out on top.

Clear-eyed and taut, Good Intentions asks if it is possible to be a good person in a morally grey world, and what happens when someone you once loved with your whole heart threatens to topple everything you've built.

Genres: Fiction, Audiobook, Book Club, Romance, Literary Fiction

Audible Audio

Published June 30, 2026

Reviews

[Emily Michelle]

DNF’d the second it started talking about peptides and ozempic 🤯

[Jade]

not even the epic highs and lows of sydney university stupol could save this

[Guy S · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good Intentions (2026) is the closest a novel has come (so far) to mirroring my life. Jake Sullivan in particular mirrors many of my biographical details, a hippie family, debating, student journalism, law, Newtown. Nadia less so - but I know Nadia's. People often speak of being comforted by books they can relate to - and I certainly echo that. But I'm not sure Good Intentions is for me.

Every story beat in this novel propels the narrative forward with military-band consistency. The characters never dwell, or reflect, or have small vignettes that are ancillary to the plot but develop characters or themes. Every-time something happens, it emerges into a plot-line. The first big story at the newspaper is the big story. The first big VC deal is the VC deal. The undulations of the plot are entirely contained in those moments, so that it feels the world the characters inhabit is incredibly flat and narrow. It also makes the story predictable, with every beat announcing itself a chapter ahead.

I don't recognise Jake and Nadia at all, particularly Jake. They call each other by their last names like two blokes from Riverview? I thought the side characters, from Camilla (is that her name, Lucille, Michael etc were more clearly depicted). Some character choices only make sense if you read them in a subversive light, like maybe that Felicity didn't like Jake that much anyway and thought she could get rid of him - otherwise her final choice is beyond baffling is the type of ostentatious self-sacrifice to tee-up a story beat that saps a character of texture.

Other scatterbrained thoughts
- The novel tries to place itself in Australia and then jarringly adopts American jargon at points, my job title is ASSOCIATE (would accept tipstaff as well) not clerk.
- Why was the lawyer a caricature of a flamboyant gay man.
- Miles Salvatore, anti-Italian discrimination…?
- Absolutely no way you could pull off a biotech scheme like this one in a country as over-regulated and sclerotic as Australia (which is why this country is awesome)
- Why not just set this at USyd when it is so obviously based there… is that really a legal issue?
- Thought the romantic scenes were a bit flat.
- Everything came too quickly and easily in the journalistic investigations - not enough build-up.
- At random points the author starts writing AFR opinion columns, stood out pretty easily.
- Why is a man of Jake's Sullivans woke credentials using the word 'tosser'

Stuff I liked
- The trivia scene was heartwarming
- I liked when they mentioned Ariana

[ally · Rating 2 out of 5]

regretted not starting a « speak truth to power » counter at the beginning.

i love sydney and a romance but the characters felt a bit flat - the kind of figures made to push the plot of a sitcom forward. no depth, no humanity. like seeing one-paragraph summaries of a few key personality traits placed repeatedly into different circumstances.

and on a serious note (and maybe this is a sign of my own flawed obstinacy) i’m not quite sure i ever believed the premise that there are ways to believe that you can change the world positively by working in big finance…

[k · Rating 1 out of 5]

devastated to see crappy wmaf stories have made it to the sydney scene. sick of descriptions of almond eyes, smelly lunchboxes and a weird inconsistency in the use of mandarin (qiezi, baobei) and cantonese (gwei lo when the mandarin pinyin is gui lao - which perhaps betrays the author’s intended audience for this book).

also jane street ny is in downtown, not midtown and von neumann’s weighted coin is described as the “ban school uniforms” of maths interview questions (why on earth did old mate pull out python?!?).

separately, “henderson versus the monitor” … come on …

[Aislin Wells · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 ★ — in a world full of novels written entirely by AI, this author makes the brave new choice to supplement about 30% worth of original content with only 70% sounding like regurgitated chatgpt-speak! credit where credit is due though because the premise was fun and the bits that didn’t sound like AI really were quite good

[Lehan · Rating 1 out of 5]

We don’t need more academia-adjacent poorly written smut slop trash can litfic, even if it’s set in Sydney

[Umbar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ex-debaters have written much better. In fairness to Jessy Wu, other ex-debaters would probably write much worse.

[Samuel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Why is the dude in this named after the blue guy from Avatar? Why does book club keep making me read about people who "unravel" before having inadvisably emotionally intense sex? Could any background to romance be less interesting than a conflict over drab, corporate amorality?

[Olivia · Rating 2 out of 5]

My god where do we begin with this review? I had high hopes but within the first few chapters my interest was waning and the book didn’t improve from there. I was honestly so relieved to get to the end and be done with this book.

My criticism falls into a few buckets:

1. Lack of character development / depth: Nadia and Jake are never built out well - in fact, I felt like their characters had been written in a beginners fiction course. Other than hearing about Nadia’s immigrant background and Jake’s moral compass of steel, we didn’t get any glimpses into their personalities. I found this boring and hard to invest in emotionally as they were so two-dimensional. I wasn’t even slightly convinced that they loved each other, don’t even get me started on when they had sex - ZERO connection. Nothing about them made them interesting or likeable. The dialogue was so unrealistic, maybe my friends just aren’t intellectuals but genuinely I’ve never met anyone who talks the way these characters did. The only exception was Jake’s colleague, Caroline, who had her own chapter which was honestly probably the best chapter of the entire book.

2. Messy, unnecessary subplots: no doubt the author is highly intelligent. However, I didn’t need her to continue reminding us of this through a myriad of complicated subplots, from wage theft to corruption, econometrics and quantitative trading, peptides and biotech, none of which I really felt served the plot - these just felt like the author trying to show off knowledge of a wide range of topics that didn’t tell me anything about the characters. Impressive for the author herself, totally irrelevant to the plot and by the 60% mark I was skimming through.

3. Completely inaccurate depiction of Finance careers, specifically private equity: this is where I took the most issue to be honest. The career path from Quant trader in NYC (straight out of university, might I add) to private equity didn’t make sense.
After that, the main character being sent to Australia to lead the APAC fund and yet doing HER OWN DUE DILIGENCE on deals was completely ludicrous - no self respecting private equity professional is conducting DD on their own without an army of advisors, PARTICULARLY in a field as technical as biotech.
An investment being put to a vote at Investment Committee with NO follow up questions, discussion or debate did my head in.
Finally, I did not understand why the protagonist was leading a Series C fundraising round as someone who worked in private equity (this is late stage venture capital or growth equity, not private equity). Then the court case - don’t even get me started. Poorly researched mish mash of Finance careers which I couldn’t get past. As someone who worked in VC herself, I expected the author to have a better grasp of the different stages of investing and the investing process.

[Jiadi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually inhaled this because I was so invested in the main characters after the first half. But then the legal drama took me completely out of it - it was an unrealistic depiction of how a proceeding runs in Australia. I think the author needed to do some research.

Despite that, I’m updating this to 4 stars though as, on reflection, the emotions, the relationship between the main characters and the tension were all effective and definitely left an impression on me.

[Carrie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This felt more like a YA novel than the “Normal People meets Industry” vibe the book’s marketing campaign promised. The characters lacked depth and the dialogue was incredibly cringey; I’m baffled as to why this is so common in Australian books, like whyyyyy is it so hard to write realistic conversations 😣

The legal aspects of the plot (in the 2nd half of the book) dragged on and failed to create any suspense or tension. The FMC had no personality. Very predictable & a bit meh overall…

[Janet C · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not really connect with the characters in this book. I thought the first half of the book when they were both still in school was decent, but I really just did not like the second half at all and found myself rather bored.
Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC

[Keely · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thank god that’s over - only completed it as I suggested it for book club after having it recommended on instagram and TikTok. So cringey and slow. Do not rec

[Alanah Kerec · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of like a sandwich in delicious bread with bland fillings…the start and end were good, the middle made me wanna DNF

[Raveena · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars! Ah... why do podcasts hype up their recommendations so much only for them to be sooo average? Like there is nothing wrong with this book but do I actually think it will lead to an insightful book club conversation - not really? I guess this book was trying to do a little bit too much but also didn't really do much at all. A student love story mixed with some moral/political commentary is basically what this was. I found myself not being totally convinced that the "due diligence" was done when it came to how this novel explored the different industries/jobs/people it dived into.

I feel like there was potential here to explore how at different ages, young adults value different things and over time as they get exposed into the real world their values change and evolve.

I also really don't love how much at the end of the novel, it spoke about how great of a storyline it is repeatedly. I'm not sure if the business world would've totally cared about what was happening in this book.

Jake was really unsufferable. I would go work in an investment business just to make him angry too.

Love to support aussie authors and the book is written well, I am overly critical because it's my pick for book club and its a lil bit average :(

[Swai · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hmmm. Some books know that they're fluff and embrace the fun of triviality. Other books -- this one -- strive for seriousness and come across as all the more cringe as a result. It was hard to see Nadia and Jake as more than allegorical personas, and for all the novel's righteous posturing, its actual politics are rather conservative (notably about gender...and there may have been a vaguely homophobic line?). Because I did not particularly care for or care about Jake and Nadia as characters, I took but a passing interest in their romance -- although, admittedly, the romance drives the plot better than either journalistic muckracking or corporate ladder climbing. The novel did pick up after the college years (these chapters were the worst in my opinion), and I didn't need to read to the end of the novel to grasp its not-that-deep message. When the end did finally come, I was relieved to be able to move on to what will hopefully be a palette cleanser.

[J 🌺 · Rating 1.5 out of 5]

A couple torn apart by ideals, find themselves back in each others’ lives on opposite ends of a groundbreaking story. This book has all the ingredients needed to be a gripping, exciting and messy tale of love and what it means to be true to yourself in a world that is increasingly grey. Unfortunately, it never really lives up to the promise. It should have been more exciting, uncovering falsehoods, catching people in their lies and putting the puzzle pieces together alongside our MCs - but the writing was flat and frankly a little uninteresting.
Sadly, there was little to no chemistry between the two leads as well - making it extremely unbelievable that they’d both be as hung up over each other even years after a very anti-climatic breakup. The love story, which the book hinges on, fell flat.
Overall, the story had all the right beats set in place but didn’t land - wish it was more fleshed out.

[Emily Cook · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good intentions is a masterclass in unrealistic dialogue, one dimensional characters, telling, not showing and a plot pushed along by “and then and then and then”.

Normally I love when someone like Reid weaves Sydney into a story, but Wu’s clunkiness made it feel like she was naming references for the sake of naming them. Nothing about this felt uniquely Sydney or uniquely NYC.

I do have a soft spot for all things finance/VC/legal and part 2’s plot - though very squeaky clean - really drove this one home. But I can’t really go higher than 2.5

[Kate Gough · Rating 3 out of 5]

This started strong, but the ending (and particularly when the legal drama started) really took me out of it. As an Australian lawyer, I felt so disappointed about how unrealistic the depiction was. I wish the author had just done a bit more research. I couldn’t get back into the story after - the timelines felt confused and dialogue unrealistic, and I wonder how accurate the depiction was re careers in journalism/finance. In any event, I enjoyed the first 60%, and in particular the exploration of idealism v pragmatism, and always feel more connected to stories set in Australia.

[Koush · Rating 1 out of 5]

Book club was Fake News'd into reading this

[Linda Nixon · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very easy read, I just love books that are set in my world (usyd). However I found the central theme quite simplistic and predictable - maybe morality isn’t black and white??? Who would’ve thought. Enjoyed it for a beach holiday but not sure I’d really recommend it onwards.

[Zach Mackey · Rating 2.5 out of 5]

First half of the novel felt like it was adequately covered by the blurb on the back of the book, second half felt rushed, under researched and perhaps a fantasy of what could have been.
Fantastically covered the self involvement of student politicians…

[Liam Fitzgerald · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sharp and pacy, particularly at the start. As it went on, I felt that what it gained in concision, it lost in nuance. The later moments felt more like reading a plot summary (with each moment rushing into the next between the two main characters), rather than unpacking its key moral question.

[Meg Kanofski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stars because I did rip through this and because its fan-fic depiction of journalism made me laugh (I enjoyed Jake getting to publish FIVE THOUSAND words on the dumping of hazardous materials as a cadet).

The dialogue was terribly cheesy. No one talks like that, not even Honi Soit editors.

[Gay Harding]

Just not very interesting. If it’s going anywhere it’s taking too long at 90 pages.

[Rochelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you went/go to usyd, this would be great. For anyone who didn’t go to usyd, and find honi and the clique insufferable, this is not for you.

[Harriet]

I couldn’t make it past 30%. Just did not care about the story or characters at all and has put me in a major reading slump.

[Maddie · Rating 2 out of 5]

So incredibly boring idk how I finished this

[nihaarika · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

not super sure about the accuracy of the legal proceedings in the last half of the book, but overall good intentions was a really compelling & gripping read. a stellar debut from jessy wu!!

longer rtc!