I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai 

Read by Julia Whelan, JD Jackson

14 hours, 4 minutes

Published February 2023 by Penguin Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

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.

My Thoughts: 

It's late and I'm way behind on reviews so I'm going to get straight to it. 

What I Liked: 

• I requested the audiobook version because I find I have far more time for those than physical or digital books (well, far fewer of them waiting for me to get to them, at least) and I'm so glad I did. Julia Whalen is, as alway, terrific. 
• This is a book, ostensibly, about the murder of a young woman years ago. It's actually about far more than that. It's about the way our justice system works (or doesn't); it's about the power of social media to do good and also to destroy lives; it's about the Me-Too movement and the ways men in positions of power can misuse that power; and it's about the ways society discounts and devalues women. Because of the way the book is written, none of it feels forced. 
• Throughout the book are interspersed different versions of what might have actually happened to Thalia Keith and every one of them felt believable. 
• The book is largely written as though Bodie were writing to a former teacher, her favorite, who she has come to realize may have been acting inappropriately, not just with her, but with other young women as well. It's a terrific red herring. 
• There is no happily-ever-after and you know how much I usually like that in a book. And I did...sort of. But it came in a way that made me so frustrated with our justice system, reminding me of the recent executions of men who were convicted but appear to have been innocent. 

What Didn't Work For Me:

• There is a little bit of that feeling that Makkai may have been trying to work in all of the talking points. It seems logical in the course of the story, but yet...maybe too much.
• Did all of that work that Bodie and her students do result in answers and new leads just a little too easily? Maybe. 
• I felt a little bit like Bodie's back story unnecessary. Not that we didn't need it in the book; it explained why she felt like an outcast. But it could have been something far more ordinary. 

All in all, I really liked this one and I'm looking forward to reading Makkai's The Great Believers...when I can find it. Is it on my shelves somewhere? On my Nook app? Thanks to whoever recommended this one to me.