A review by alliereads_
Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe

dark informative

2.5

I really struggled to see how each story fit in with each others or with any overarching theme of true crime. The first chapter felt more like a historical lesson on forensics than a story about a woman obsessed with acting as a detective in a singular compelling case. This continues into the third and fourth parts with diatribes on immigration and Ayn Rand; neither were uninteresting or unimportant to me, but were not even close to what I would expect from a book labeled to be about true crime and the predominantly female obsession with it. 

Everything feels so disjointed; jumping within each chapter from character to character and story to story without ever drawing a clear thread between them. 

I also wasn’t expected so much of the book, within chapters dedicated to specific women, to be anecdotal to Monroe’s life. While she was clearly influenced to write this book because of her relationship to true crime, I was disappointed that all of the reflection didn’t lead her to a thesis on its impact by the end. It wasn’t until the end of part four, where Monroe self-reflected on her part in the true crime community and on mean world syndrome, that I felt like the book had any purpose. 

I would describe this book more as personal essay-meets-historical nonfiction than I would as an exploration of the true crime genre. Not a bad read necessarily, but incredibly different than how it was marketed. 
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