cronareads's review

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challenging emotional reflective fast-paced

5.0


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rronnniii's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective slow-paced

5.0

Amazing. Deep. Complex. I would love to reread one day with more time so I can deeply annotate. 

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miachimochi's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

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johoha93's review

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leahcatching's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense medium-paced

3.75


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shieldbearer's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

3.0

Rating memoirs always feels strange to me, but this is not a pure memoir, this is also a nonfictional account, and it is on those grounds I find fault. I am aware the author says upfront that several events around the events of the Langley trial/murder are composite, compressed or otherwise altered, but frankly I deeply disliked the aspect where the author is clearly ascribing and assuming the thought processes of the real people involved in this. "[y person] MUST HAVE [felt/thought z thing]" got extremely, tediously old. It also got irritating when the author frequently ascribed personalities and descriptions onto people we could get only glimpses from fact. Why is every person we have such glimpses of imagined by the author to be young and naive?? I would much have preferred a straight forward account of all the contradictions and complexities, even if it was more complicated. The writing is beautiful but I couldn't get past the framing.


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greatexpectations77's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.75

Whew, this book is so so hard, and probably because it's so well-written. I think it's as close to poetry as prose comes. So much research, so much hurt, so much trauma. Incredible. Would read anything Marzano-Lesnevich wrote.

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akswhy's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

4.25

Come for the true crime case, stay for the interwoven memoir.

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thornthistle's review

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dark emotional informative sad medium-paced

5.0


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selketjewett's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

This was not an easy book to read. It’s pretty graphic and deals with some really traumatic material. That being said, the writing and the way this book is constructed is full of emotion and vulnerability and not like much I’ve read before. 

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