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piburnjones 's review for:
I Have Some Questions for You
by Rebecca Makkai
Whew. I inhaled this over about a day and a half. I love a school setting, and I love a mystery. This delivered both of those things in spades, but it's also deliberately unsettling.
Our narrator is a middle-aged woman who finds herself obsessing over the murder of a high school classmate when she returns to the boarding school she attended. The main part of the action is set over two weeks in 2018, as she's teaching a couple of short courses — also while the husband from whom she is separating gets called out for the way he treated an ex-girlfriend many years before.
So: trigger warnings for… honestly, just about everything. What comes up the most is how often women are brutally murdered, often by an intimate partner, and the upsetting ways in which their bodies are hidden, or found. But also sexual abuse, racial discrimination, eating disorders, bullying, teenage smoking, drinking, drugs and sex, and inappropriate student-teacher relationships. Oh, and COVID, as the last third of the book jumps to 2022.
Genre-wise, this is not a thriller or a horror story: It's a cold case. Or rather, a case that seems to be closed, but which was handled poorly, leaving a lot of doubt about whether the right person is in jail.
Bodie, our narrator, spends a lot of time reliving her high school years and reflecting on how those memories look different from an adult perspective (and if you follow my reviews, this is obviously very much my jam). Things she noticed, but didn't put together sometimes slide into place, and are sometimes turned entirely upside down when she encounters various classmates, hearing details and perspectives they never shared with her as teenagers.
We spend a lot of the book in Bodie's head. She wrestles with the reliability of memory — especially memories of 25 years ago — and with the amount of power teenagers' testimonies were given in this particular murder investigation. As the obsession takes hold of her, she wrestles a lot with whether she should be involved at all, whether this is a can of worms worth opening, what her responsibility is to the lives that might be upended — or the seemingly innocent life of the man behind bars — or to the murdered classmate herself.
One of the most interesting writing choices is that we gradually realize that Bodie is the rare first-person narrator who is talking to someone very specific: someone from her school years that she comes to see as a suspect. We never pan back to show her actually recounting this to him, so I assume she is addressing him only in her head, but it's a very striking choice.
As a narrator, Bodie is thoughtful, passionate and reflective, but can also be inconsistent and impulsive. She's messy and complicated, but even in moments where I didn't agree with her, she always felt real.
Throughout the book, we're reminded that convictions are very rarely overturned, and Makkai doesn't give us a fairytale ending. But without spoilers, by the end, we do have a satisfying picture of who the real killer was, and how it was done, and why.
Our narrator is a middle-aged woman who finds herself obsessing over the murder of a high school classmate when she returns to the boarding school she attended. The main part of the action is set over two weeks in 2018, as she's teaching a couple of short courses — also while the husband from whom she is separating gets called out for the way he treated an ex-girlfriend many years before.
So: trigger warnings for… honestly, just about everything. What comes up the most is how often women are brutally murdered, often by an intimate partner, and the upsetting ways in which their bodies are hidden, or found. But also sexual abuse, racial discrimination, eating disorders, bullying, teenage smoking, drinking, drugs and sex, and inappropriate student-teacher relationships. Oh, and COVID, as the last third of the book jumps to 2022.
Genre-wise, this is not a thriller or a horror story: It's a cold case. Or rather, a case that seems to be closed, but which was handled poorly, leaving a lot of doubt about whether the right person is in jail.
Bodie, our narrator, spends a lot of time reliving her high school years and reflecting on how those memories look different from an adult perspective (and if you follow my reviews, this is obviously very much my jam). Things she noticed, but didn't put together sometimes slide into place, and are sometimes turned entirely upside down when she encounters various classmates, hearing details and perspectives they never shared with her as teenagers.
We spend a lot of the book in Bodie's head. She wrestles with the reliability of memory — especially memories of 25 years ago — and with the amount of power teenagers' testimonies were given in this particular murder investigation. As the obsession takes hold of her, she wrestles a lot with whether she should be involved at all, whether this is a can of worms worth opening, what her responsibility is to the lives that might be upended — or the seemingly innocent life of the man behind bars — or to the murdered classmate herself.
One of the most interesting writing choices is that we gradually realize that Bodie is the rare first-person narrator who is talking to someone very specific: someone from her school years that she comes to see as a suspect. We never pan back to show her actually recounting this to him, so I assume she is addressing him only in her head, but it's a very striking choice.
As a narrator, Bodie is thoughtful, passionate and reflective, but can also be inconsistent and impulsive. She's messy and complicated, but even in moments where I didn't agree with her, she always felt real.
Throughout the book, we're reminded that convictions are very rarely overturned, and Makkai doesn't give us a fairytale ending. But without spoilers, by the end, we do have a satisfying picture of who the real killer was, and how it was done, and why.