Jessica Woodbury's Reviews > I Have Some Questions for You

Hi, nice to meet you, I am apparently the only person who didn't love this book. It was little things at first. Little hints that maybe me and this book were not right for each other. And then, all at once, it was many big things. It was everything. This book and I just fundamentally disagree on a lot of things.

I have been procrastinating writing this review because I have been trying to figure out what my complaint is. At first I thought it was just that I thought we were going one way when actually we were going somewhere else entirely, that it was about my expectations. But the longer I think about it, the more I realize that this book and I are living almost in different universes. We are operating according to a different moral code. Unfortunately this realization has only made this question even more complicated.

Hypothetically I am happy to read books that have a different morality than mine. It's pretty rare for a book to share my values in a very significant way! And yet, there are times when it rubs me so utterly wrong that it is like an itch. (This is also why I cannot read Louise Penny. The morality of her universe makes me nauseous.) Why is it so hard for me to enjoy a world that doesn't punish what is bad or reward what is good the way I think it should? I have read so many books where it isn't required. But I suppose, often in those books, the book and I agree on whether this punishment/reward is good/bad/complicated. In this book, the book and I just differ entirely on basically everything about our protagonist, Bodie.

I think Bodie is obsessive to the point that it is very very bad. I understand why a person would be obsessive about a murder committed in such close proximity to them. It would be a lot! It would be hard! It would leave all kinds of scars. But Bodie goes too far. She goes too far over and over again. And she doesn't ever seem to acknowledge that in the slightest. The book knows it because other characters will sometimes try to gently dissuade her. So I thought the book and I were in this together. Until, well, the book starts to present the opposite view: that Bodie's obsessiveness is actually doggedness, that it is actually a positive quality. I kept waiting for Bodie's life to melt into a puddle of self-inflicted disaster, because that was the kind of outcome that would happen to someone who acts the way Bodie does. But the universe of the book said no, we will reward Bodie. Reward her to the point that it's hard to believe the book is set in the real world. And more than that, the book believes this reward is good. It won't be all sunshine and rainbows for her, but she will ultimately do what needs to be done. She is morally in the right. And there, book, I deeply disagree with you.

There were other hints that this book and I have deeply different moral compasses. The way Bodie doesn't take her students' concerns about race/gender/sexuality seriously, the way she runs straight into a #metoo debacle, the way she doesn't keep appropriate boundaries with her teenage (teenage!!!) students, the way the book keeps creating murky moral dilemmas that Bodie trudges right through with not nearly as much care as she should and somehow never really has to face any consequences for. Bodie is charmed the way a detective in a cozy mystery is charmed, she always finds the thing she needs to find just when she needs to find it. I suppose that tracks, since she also somehow has both a fancy university job and a popular podcast and enough money to own a duplex in Southern California even though her husband is an artist. Lucky Bodie.

I just kept waiting for Bodie to face the consequences of her own actions. I listened to the audiobook and kept talking back to it, saying, "Bodie this is stupid," "Bodie this is a bad idea." And then Bodie never had to do much of anything to deal with any of these consequences. Must be nice to be Bodie.

I guess I assumed from how highly everyone spoke of this book that it would present some moral complexities. And it starts to many times, but it never really goes anywhere with them. The one thing it doesn't hedge on is the overwhelming volume of violence against women that makes all these crimes run together. It uses a simple device for this, repeats it often, and it isn't ineffective. But the book itself doesn't underline this point, except to note that there were so many men who could have hurt this particular poor beautiful dead girl.

The world of true crime is deeply troubling, often exploitative, many would argue the fact that the genre exists at all is bad. I guess I thought this book wanted to grapple with the impact of true crime narratives, I thought that was the interesting way to tell this kind of story and make it different from all the other stories of dead teenage girls. (There are truly so many of these books that I have started avoiding them.) Why else would Bodie be so invested in a true crime podcast if you didn't want to examine that?

In particular the handling of the metoo story here is underbaked. I do not think you can say it "examines" it in any detail. It has the opportunity, especially as it involves one of the gray areas that we as a society are so bad at talking about. But Makkai doesn't lay out all of this as complex. There is a vague hostility through it, specifically hostility towards the woman who makes the accusation, while there's a general assumption of no bad intent on the part of the man. We do not take it much further than that, except to note that there are twitter pile-ons which, the book seems to feel, are evidence of mob rule and undeserved canceling. Except it's entirely unclear that this canceling is actually a real consequence or that it is undeserved. I waited for us to dive into this, to see how memory really is fickle and difficult and how we can misjudge ourselves and those around us, only for the book to entirely waltz around it, as if it hadn't even happened.

I just don't get it. I don't understand how this book could satisfy a reader. Clearly it has satisfied many of them, but it only made me more and more frustrated once we reached the major turning point of the book. Every now and then there is a book that I don't like or don't get that everyone absolutely fawns over and apparently this year it is this one.

I give it three stars because Makkai is good at lots of things, I couldn't stop listening. And if Makkai agreed with me that Bodie is a walking disaster, then I would have really loved this book.