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A review by gayathiri_rajendran
The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing by Sonia Faleiro
4.0
This has been one of the most difficult reviews I had to write. I couldn't put my thoughts into sentences because of shock. The Good Girls is tragic but powerful work on investigative journalism by Sonia Faleiro.
In 2014,two teenage girls were found hanging from a mango tree in Katra Sadatgani in Uttar Pradesh. The girls had stepped out the previous night to relieve themselves before bedtime and they had not returned back. After hours of searching, they were discovered in such an eerie setting. The way they were found made the incident go viral on social media. The family refused to let the authorities bring the bodies down until they got justice.
This book reads like an actual thriller which starts from the beginning and tells the incident in a chronological manner with several unexpected information and twists in the middle. The police didn't do a proper job with the initial investigations and combined with the unreliable witness statements and shoddy autopsies, there was a lot of confusion happening. The author tries to establish a timeline of events and there are descriptions of the village in which the girls grew up in, the social and economic conditions in rural India, caste, customs and the mistrust of authorities. She traces the incident in Katra, to the initial police investigation and the handover of the case to the CBI.
This is one of the quotes from the book which resonated with me.
“The story of Padma* and Lalli* revealed something more terrible still – That an Indian woman’s first challenge was surviving her own home.”
*The girls’ names have been changed in accordance with Indian law which requires that the identity of victims of certain crimes remain private.
What really happened to both the girls will forever be shrouded in mystery and none of us will ever really know. This was such a disturbing and uncomfortable read but very enlightening. It made me feel incredibly fortunate.
In 2014,two teenage girls were found hanging from a mango tree in Katra Sadatgani in Uttar Pradesh. The girls had stepped out the previous night to relieve themselves before bedtime and they had not returned back. After hours of searching, they were discovered in such an eerie setting. The way they were found made the incident go viral on social media. The family refused to let the authorities bring the bodies down until they got justice.
This book reads like an actual thriller which starts from the beginning and tells the incident in a chronological manner with several unexpected information and twists in the middle. The police didn't do a proper job with the initial investigations and combined with the unreliable witness statements and shoddy autopsies, there was a lot of confusion happening. The author tries to establish a timeline of events and there are descriptions of the village in which the girls grew up in, the social and economic conditions in rural India, caste, customs and the mistrust of authorities. She traces the incident in Katra, to the initial police investigation and the handover of the case to the CBI.
This is one of the quotes from the book which resonated with me.
“The story of Padma* and Lalli* revealed something more terrible still – That an Indian woman’s first challenge was surviving her own home.”
*The girls’ names have been changed in accordance with Indian law which requires that the identity of victims of certain crimes remain private.
What really happened to both the girls will forever be shrouded in mystery and none of us will ever really know. This was such a disturbing and uncomfortable read but very enlightening. It made me feel incredibly fortunate.