I Have Some Questions For You
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I Have Some Questions For You is fine. I wouldn’t recommend it to people but I also enjoyed reading it at times and don’t regret the investment. Still, as a woman, you don’t wanna be a basic bitch, and as a book, you don’t wanna be just *fine*.
It follows Bodie, a professor and podcaster who revisits her childhood boarding school, which resurfaces a traumatic event– the murder of her former roommate while they were students. Someone was locked up for the crime, but there's a lot of things about the case that are shady af.
While it’s technically a thriller, it wasn’t thrilling. It was very slow moving, revisiting details of the crime a thousand times from a thousand angles. It became an overly granular rabbit hole. This would not have bothered me that much if it weren’t for the fact that the ending (no spoilers) is unsatisfying. IMO, all that minutiae for nothin.
That being said, the book has its merits. Its title is indicative– the book is written to someone, not in a traditional letter format but in the sense that Bodie is addressing someone in her mind. Someone who she believes is culpable in some way– maybe not for the murder itself but at least for an underlying morally gray mistreatment of women that pervades the book. This makes for an interesting narration. It adds a lil flavor. Despite this, though, it produced a rather lukewarm take on the #MeToo movement. It had the potential and squandered it, making pretty surface level statements. Like, I think we can all easily recognize that child grooming is bad.
One plus, for me at least, is that it has a modern voice with contemporary references. I think there’s a strong, relevant way to do this and a cheesy, forced way to do this, and this book falls in the former category. There’s references to pop culture and social media trends but they feel natural to the character and story. I don’t like that in all of my books but I can appreciate it here, where she’s attempting to comment on a current movement.
This book got a lot of buzz in the literary world, but it felt lackluster to me. The author, Rebecca Makkai, was nominated for several awards including a Pulitzer for her previous novel, so while I didn’t hate I Have Some Questions For You, I definitely expected more. It receives 2 out of 5 flames.
