I Have Some Questions For You
'A perfect crime' NEW YORKER
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3.6 • 62 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'Whip-smart and uncompromising' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
'Quietly riveting' IRISH TIMES
'It's the perfect crime' NEW YORKER
'Impressive and complex' GUARDIAN
'Addictive' OPRAH DAILY
The riveting new novel from the author of The Great Believers, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award
A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past: the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the 1995 murder of a classmate, Thalia Keith. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia's death and the conviction of the school's athletics coach, Omar Evans, are the subject of intense fascination online, Bodie prefers-needs-to let sleeping dogs lie.
But when The Granby School invites her back to teach a two-week course, Bodie finds herself inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn't as much of an outsider at Granby as she'd thought-if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.
One of the most acclaimed contemporary American writers, Rebecca Makkai reinvents herself with each of her brilliant novels. Both a transfixing mystery and a deeply felt examination of one woman's reckoning with her past, I Have Some Questions for You is her finest achievement yet.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this addictive and multi-layered novel from acclaimed US writer Rebecca Makkai, podcaster and academic Bodie Kane accepts a two-week teaching position at Granby—the high school she graduated from 22 years ago, and the place where her roommate was murdered. She’s tried to live life like the murder never happened, but has niggling doubts about the guilt of the man jailed for the crime. As she and her enthralled Granby podcasting students mull over new scraps of information and fresh theories, Bodie privately questions the beliefs she holds about the school where her ambitions were born, and starts to shine a light on some long-buried memories. I Have Some Questions For You interrogates the public’s morbid fascination with murdered women and explores the mind-bending disorientation of revisiting the people and places that shape a person. It presents as a down-the-line whodunit, but its insightful commentary on power structures makes it so much more.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Makkai returns after her Pulitzer-finalist The Great Believers with a clever and deeply thoughtful story involving a 1990s boarding school murder and its repercussions decades later. Bodie Kane, a successful 40-year-old podcaster, returns from Los Angeles to her alma mater in New Hampshire in 2018 to teach. After two of her students team up on a Serial-like podcast about the killing of Thalia Keith, whose murder was pinned on the school's Black athletic trainer, Omar Evans, questions are raised about the state's flimsy case against Omar and Thalia's classmates' racist assumptions about his guilt. Meanwhile, Bodie reexamines her own understanding of what happened, and comes to grips with the predatory behavior of her and Thalia's beloved music teacher. Just as Makkai brought a keen perspective to the 1980s with her previous novel, she does a brilliant job here at showing how in the '90s girls were conditioned to shrug off sexual assault. A steady stream of precise, cringe-inducing period details—Thalia's manipulative jock boyfriend belts out "Come to My Window" while drunk—prove the reader's in good hands. A final act, set in spring 2022, brings more of the classmates together for a deliciously complex reckoning. This is sure to be a hit.
Customer Reviews
Meh
The author is a critically acclaimed American writer, whose last novel The Great Believers (2018) was a finalist for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and won a number of lesser literary prizes. She teaches in the MFA course at Northwestern, and is artistic director of StoryStudioChicago.
Bodie is a successful, recently divorced, female podcaster and film producer, whose artist ex-husband lives under the same roof as her in LA and co-parents their two kids. Our gal accepts a short teaching residency at the boarding school in rural New Hampshire, where she spent four angst filled years being bullied herself (for being poor mostly). If that weren’t enough, her room mate in junior year is murdered at the start of their senior year. Bodie has been worried ever since that the dude now doing the time, did not do the crime. So is a slightly mysterious student in her podcasting class, who revisits the case as her project.
I was not as taken with The Great Believers as I expected to be. The same here. It started off okay but was about a hundred pages too long. Several side plots could have been cut without determent to the whole IMO. Bodie was a tad whiny and more than tad solipsistic.
Ms M writes well, and puts her own spin on The Secret History vibe, but breaks no new ground in the true crime podcaster detective trope, which has grown to epidemic proportions in recent years. She does make a few points about cancel culture, but it all came off a bit meh for this pale, stale, male reader.
Confusing
Too many characters,too many themes. Couldn’t finish it