I Have Some Questions For You

When I first started listening to this book I thought it might be too slow for me to enjoy. I was extremely wrong. This book kept me on the hook the entire time. I felt like I was following breadcrumbs along well. Also getting to view complex characters and character dynamics. Overall. I really enjoyed this. Would recommend to anyone as a female reader. It was relatable and it filled me with rage and also with some relief

A mystery about a murder at a boarding school where the wrong man may be in prison. This one was a slow start, but really picked up in the last 150 pages or so. Rebecca Makkai wrote one of my fav books (The Great Believers), so I wanted so badly to love this. I did LIKE it, but I thought it was confused and perhaps 100 pages too long. It was trying to say too much, about the injustices in our penal system, about MeToo and grooming, about inequality, etc. it just felt a bit convoluted and could have done well with some editing.

I loved this - hear me out.
I love to read a good thriller when I'm in a reading slump, even if it's crap, I still enjoy it. However, this was not crap and it ended up being a really refreshing thriller mystery that was more of a slow burn.

This felt so true to how real life plays out. At the end of the day, you don't get the guilty convicted, you're not always right when you try to trust your gut, and the main character is not a great person or even really a hero. All of these characters feel so real with their petty hatred and love for each other and being hung up on their high school experiences because of this trauma bond that happens between all of them.

There's so many times when a crime is committed and there's not overwhelming evidence for just one person, so much of the details are speculative and circumstantial, and that's how every single one of these theories played out. I love that you never quite understand what happened. As someone who gets really frustrated with all the true crime podcast sensationalizing murder, I really appreciate what this novel was trying to do.

All that being said, I do think the book was a bit longer than I needed to be, and while the main character was meant to be flawed, at times she was straight up annoying. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed this, and it was a really refreshing thriller to add to the library.

3.5. I consumed this book as an audiobook, which was a really enjoyable experience. With its short chapters and engaging storytelling, I honestly had a great time listening to this. However, it felt a bit long for my taste, while also leaving some topics not adequately explored. I won't go into many details, but this is a book for people interested in true crime and podcasts in that genre. However, as entertaining as it was, the statement that it was trying to make feels so obvious and cliche that it holds it back from a 4-star rating. It's written in a clear and accessible way, while still managing to deliver compelling emotions that keep you coming back for more. It was a good time, but nothing exceptional.

OK so, I picked this up off display and was like “oh yeah I've been meaning to read this” and then gradually I realized that actually, I'd been thinking of [b:No One Is Talking About This 53733106 No One Is Talking About This Patricia Lockwood https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1601474686l/53733106.SY75.jpg 84057345] which is completely different. I have some questions about why no one is talking about this. Anyway by that point I was pretty sucked in so I kept reading although this is a little far afield of my usual preference (ie it's a murder mystery). I liked the podcaster angle a lot as well as the “cancel culture” part. I sort of enjoyed splashing around in the pool of “true crime is problematic but also helpful” waters although I'm not sure it's doing anything really groundbreaking in that area.

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai is an exceptionally well-written book. The story concerns a murder case from more than twenty years ago and the possibility that the wrong man has been jailed. Revisiting and rethinking everything that happened during the college years brings up painful memories from the past in an effort to find the truth about who killed Thalia.

This was a twisty, TWISTY mystery, which it is at its core. Its about figuring out who really committed a crime, which makes it a mystery. But it's also about memory, and how memory works. We think we remember a story right, but then something will come up that will change everything. Maybe it???s something we notice in the moment, or that someone tells you in the moment. Or it might be a realization, almost a bolt out of the blue, years and years later, that changes the way a memory looks to us. This change of perception can catalyze out of anything - that???s why it???s like a bolt out of the blue sometimes. But that one moment can change SO MUCH.

Memory is unreliable, but how else do we define who we are as people? How else to we make sense of our past, our present, our future? How else do we move forward in life, if not by telling ourselves ???This is what happened??? and just. Labeling that as the truth, even if the truth is always hazier and less objective than we can ever imagine?

Another thing this looks at is how true crime works as a genre. True crime's immense popularity has since opened up ethical concerns regarding amateur sleuths/journalists poking around, looking for answers, thinking they can save the world. Which, I guess is great, it???s that kind of hope that changes lives, but there???s also a lot of complications around it that need to be addressed. There???s the white saviorism angle for instance, especially in cases where the perceived victim/s are PoC. True crime podcast creators and fans are OVERWHELMINGLY white, so there???s an element of white saviorism here that needs to be addressed ethically.

Then there???s the the sensationalism of what are, in fact, deeply traumatizing, life-changing events for the people involved. While true crime can be edifying, and can even help raise awareness for cases where there have been miscarriages of justice and then set everything on the path to being made right, the fact remains that it is also spectacle, entertainment, THE REDUCTION OF AWFUL THINGS INTO CONTENT TO BE CONSUMED. There needs to be a way to grapple with that, a way to address it because it???s just not good to go digging IN OTHER PEOPLE???S LIVES just for the sake of clicks and viewer counts and downloads.

And then there???s the #MeToo layer of this novel, which ties right up with the true crime angle. Men have been doing awful, awful things to women for most of human history, and it has always been difficult to hold them accountable. #MeToo was an attempt, and in some ways it was successful, but even then it can be hard for the victims to come forward because of the backlash they can get on the internet. That shit can and does ruin lives - look what happened to Amber Heard. This novel also gets at the systemic issues that created #MeToo in the first place: how men (especially rich white men) are allowed to get away with damn near anything, and how that indoctrination starts when they???re boys.

I also want to point out the general unreliability of the narrator - which folds into all the points I mentioned above. When you???re talking about memory and crime and finding the truth, you have to remember that bias will play a role in any story that???s told. When you engage with true crime anything, you???re hearing a story AS FILTERED THROUGH SOMEONE ELSE???S BIASES. The story you're being told MIGHT be true, but there???s always going to be some kind of slant based on the things they leave in, the things they leave out, or even the way they present the things they actually leave in.

So overall, this book was an intense ride: the mystery is, I think, especially well-done, with the unreliable narrator's biases creating space for some interesting twists and turns that lead to an ending that???s inconclusive, but makes immense sense when viewed alongside the rest of the true crime genre. Its most powerful theme, though, is about memory: how it can be distorted, how it can shift and change and mutate depending on any number of reasons - and how, along with that shift, our entire selves can shift, because memory is tied up with who we are and how we view ourselves, and when the shifts are tectonic, the changes can ripple out into the way we live our lives in the present, and on into the future. 

I'm grateful for the Goodreads community as I think about this book. I agree with many of the criticisms, but I think that the strong reactions indicate that it was thought provoking and powerful enough to generate smart responses. The author captures the 90s well, particularly the boarding school bubbles. But I did feel that the mystery and the political statements around MeToo competed with — rather than complimented — each other. Still, it's an impressive feat to explore both effectively, which she did. Having just finished her previous book about the AIDS crisis, I didn't enjoy the character development here nearly as much and found the protagonist kind of annoying. But I do recommend this book for anyone who enjoys a mystery kind of like Gone Girl, but with the historical setting as a character and also explicit social commentary about gender, abuse, and racial injustice