I Have Some Questions for You
A Novel
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3.8 • 721 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Named a Best Book of 2023 by The Washington Post, People, USA Today, NPR, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Real Simple, The Boston Globe, CrimeReads and more
“A twisty, immersive whodunit perfect for fans of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.” —People
"Spellbinding." —The New York Times Book Review
"[An] irresistible literary page-turner." —The Boston Globe
The riveting new novel — "part true-crime page-turner, part campus coming-of-age" (San Francisco Chronicle) — from the author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Great Believers
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 murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.
But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is 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.
In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Bodie, the main character of Rebecca Makkai’s endlessly intriguing, shrewd, and suspenseful novel, is a true-crime podcaster who’s been invited to teach workshops at the elite boarding school she attended in the ’90s as a scholarship student. She’s also a pretty messed-up human—and being back on the woodsy campus stirs up various past traumas, including the murder of her former roommate in the spring of their senior year. A Black man who worked in the school gym as a trainer is serving time for the crime, but when one of Bodie’s students reinvestigates the case for her podcast project, it unleashes all kinds of troubling realizations on Bodie’s part, particularly concerning her former musical theater teacher. I Have Some Questions for You is a page-turning read with compelling characters and sharp insights into power dynamics.
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
Absorbing and Troubling
Detailing some ills with society, from failures of the legal system, systemic support for male dominance and violence against women and implicit racial bias, all of which still exist today. The underlying unfairness of it all may hit hardest among women readers, although it should resonate with us all.
Enjoyed
Twists and turns!
Boring and tortuously written….
I don’t know how i made it to read 53% of it.
It’s a never ending, often engulfing, mostly boring review of issues, points, and conversations that fail to be delivered in a compelling writing fashion.