Steph's Reviews > I Have Some Questions for You

⚠️ Warning - long rant ahead ⚠️

TL;DR version - this didn’t work for me at all, but everyone else seems to love it 🤷🏼‍♀️

Mark this down as yet another super hyped book that didn’t work for me. I’ve seen nothing but glowing reviews for this, but I really didn’t like it. It was painfully slow and far too long, it easily could have been trimmed back 100+ pages without losing anything important. There are also side plots that added very little to the story. This is classified as a Literary Thriller but it is not at all thrilling. I would really say its more part Literary slow burn mystery and part coming of age story.

I found the MC Bodie frustrating - she’s whiny, annoying and self absorbed in that everything has to relate back to her. So much time is spent by Bodie taking the story of her friends murder and trying to focus it on herself and her issues at the school. While also being sure to tell everyone that the podcast about the murder totally wasn’t her idea - literally this is the first thing she says to multiple people who she hasn’t talked to in years. Priorities. 🙄

I often find that Literary Fiction books focus on social issues, but this one felt like it was trying to hit upon far too many. Gender norms, racism, me too era, covid, the justice system, misogyny, cancel culture, sexual assault, predatory behavior and more, yes more! I think this would have been more effective if the author had focused on a few of these issues and really dug in and analyzed and challenged what could be done about them, or how the full impact of each is felt. Instead it was done in a very heavy handed way and issues were brought up and then quickly discarded.

There were so many characters to keep track of between the present timeline and her past time at the school and I really struggled to remember who was who. I did this on audio which probably helped contribute to this confusion, but eventually I gave up on trying to keep all the minor players straight. Randomly the MC would just begin to start listing out a variety of cases with women as the victim (was it the one about the women who was found in the dumpster, or no was it the one about… etc) which for me didn’t have the impact I think she was going for, and instead I ended up skipping past these sections after the first two instances.

When part two begins I thought it might finally pick up, but then the way its done we have to get all the information second hand which does not make for exciting reading. Things took a wildly unbelievable turn and felt very Scooby Doo in how things were found out. I really did not like how it ended, it annoyed me and I felt like I walked away from this wondering what point the author was trying to make. I gave it 2⭐️ bc I did finish it, but I also feel like I stuck it out only bc I’d already invested so much time in the far too long book.