Penance
A Novel
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3.9 • 37 Ratings
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
One of Granta's Best Young British Novelists 2023
“Eliza Clark’s writing embraces the socially unacceptable and wryly explores themes of gender, power, and violence.”—Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2023
“Chilling, clever, and unputdownable.”—Guardian
From the author of the cult hit Boy Parts comes a chilling, brilliantly told story of murder among a group of teenage girls—a powerful and disturbing novel as piercing in its portrait of young women as Emma Cline’s The Girls.
On a beach in a run-down seaside town on the Yorkshire coastline, sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson is set on fire by three other schoolgirls.
Nearly a decade after the horrifying murder, journalist Alec Z. Carelli has written the definitive account of the crime, drawn from hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves. The result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.
But how much of the story is true?
Compulsively readable, provocative, and disturbing, Penance is a cleverly nuanced, unflinching exploration of gender, class, and power that raises troubling questions about the media and our obsession with true crime while bringing to light the depraved side of human nature and our darkest proclivities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the uneven latest from Clark (Boy Parts), a group of high school girls murder their friend in a British seaside town on the eve of Brexit. The sordid events are related by Alex Z. Carelli, a once-principled journalist who is now writing salacious true crime. Bereaved by his daughter's suicide, Carelli sets out to write a bestseller about the Joni Wilson case, and is unafraid to massage a fact or two in the process. He moves to the fictional town of Crow-on-Sea in North Yorkshire, where Joni's murder took place, to interview various parties. First up is Joni's mother, who describes how her daughter was bullied. The reader soon learns from Carelli's interviews with friends of the killers that Joni became a vicious bully in her own right, and that most of them followed a similar trajectory. Early forms of social media play a significant role—one member of the group retreats into a Tumblr account devoted to her Glee fandom after she's bullied by the others, while another joins an online subculture devoted to infamous school shooters. Clark's depictions of Joni's murder—the friends set her on fire after torturing her for hours—are not only unpleasant but a bit puerile. She convinces, though, in her depiction of teen cruelty. Clark captures the reader's attention but gets mired in melodrama.
Customer Reviews
Masterful narrative
Clark really created an enticing and alluring fake-true-crime universe. I was so taken from the story and intrigued that not only I devoured the book but I was perceiving its realness. The pain, the complexity, the small town world all inserted into our modern true crime - loving culture. The author truly shows a master of the art, and an incredibly smart and talented approach to her narrative.