All Questions, No Answers

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

Pages: 438 Genre: literary fiction, mystery

Rating: 1.5 Star

Kindle Notes & Highlights

As a high school student, Bodie Kane attended Granby School, a boarding school off in the New Hampshire woods, where her time was marked primarily by the murder of her classmate and former-roommate, Thalia Keith. The police arrested the athletic trainer, Omar Evans, and most people considered the case closed. Many people, though, continued to doubt Omar's guilt. Now, over 20 years later, Bodie is an adult who has been invited back to her old campus as a teacher. Due to her successful true crime podcast, she's leading a special podcasting class for the winter semester. And then one of the students decides to cover Thalia's death, and all of Bodie's old memories come flooding back. What if, in a rush for a conviction, everyone overlooked things?

I just simply did not enjoy this book. And it was far too long, which gave me a lot of time to ruminate on all its flaws. It may not have been the worst book I've ever read, but with an irritating main character, shallow political messaging that overpowered the already-weak plot, and a personality that doesn't know what its trying to be, there were very few things about this book that helped redeem it for me.

Instead of telling the story of a victim or a perpetrator, this book decided to look into the perspective of ... some random lady. Bodie was barely related to the murder plot at all. Thalia was her roommate (not the year she was murdered, though) that she only kind of got along with. She wasn't at the big party where most people got alibis from. She just cares, I guess. Which is fine, but I care about a lot of horrible news stories that I hear about — it doesn't make me a main character. To add insult to bad writing, the living victims and perpetrators also didn't really get a voice. There was an incredibly brief conversation with one of I'd say three main suspects, but that's it. Obviously Thalia couldn't chime in much, on account of her being dead, leaving us with Bodie and her band of misfit teenagers.

Bodie is not a strong enough main character to be put in this position. We learn some interesting things about her family, her past traumas, and even her current life. When we meet her, she's meant to be vaguely famous. She's also a mother of two. Neither of these things are relevant for 90% of the book. Only one subplot would be changed if she were a single, childless nobody, and removing it wouldn't have changed the plot (plus the book would be mercifully shorter). I never had a good grasp on her personality, and all of her quirks were worrying at best and grossly hypocritical at worst.

None of the other characters were engaging enough to care about. I like Britt and Alder (Bodie's misfit teens) the most, but even they were just shallow ideas of people rather than fully-fledged characters. The problem here was that there were far too many people. Throughout the story, I think we — without exaggeration — learned the full government name and backstory of every single person Bodie interacted with in high school. It's too much information to hold on to, and it's too much information for an author to be forced to keep track of. If we cut out half of the characters and actually developed all the others, it would've been a lot more interesting.

I was pretty unimpressed with the writing throughout, though. When I say that nothing happened, I mean that nothing happened. At least, nothing happened in relationship to the main mystery plot. We had a whole collage of side plots, from Bodie getting canceled on Twitter to her ridiculous affair, but there was no real investigating. Bodie would learn new things about the murder, mostly from just thinking really hard, and we had to accept these revelations as gospel. It wasn't like she was bringing new evidence to light; at best she was re-examining old evidence. This is a 400+ page book.

I kept waiting for a tense confrontation at least, but no. The climax is literally just a conversation that has the exact same tone of speculation as every other thought from Bodie. Other than being able to look and see we were 85% through, there was nothing within the conversation that made it clear it was the Big Reveal. And, of course, nothing happened after either. Because who wants plot or conflict in their 400+ page book?

The writing device that bothered me the most was the entire framing for the novel. I don't know how much I can say about this without entirely spoiling it, so I'm going to be careful, but if you don't want any spoilers, skip this paragraph. The story is told from Bodie's first person perspective in a letter to someone she is suspecting the whole time. I hated this. Since that suspect wasn't ever that relevant, it was more of an avenue for Bodie to rant — or, more accurately, for the author to rant at me. It felt like it was supposed to be a gotcha moment, as if she was expected both the suspect and the reader to be stunned by the things she was saying. As if it were the perfect opportunity for me to re-examine my own biases and flaws. Except she wasn't actually saying anything. Bodie, I already know that our justice system is biased or that women face violence often without facing justice or that Black men are unfairly seen as violent or whatever other basic point she's making. Maybe if this is your first time ever unpacking these topics than the letter writing device is more engaging, but for me, it just felt condescending.

The other writing device that was used frequently that I couldn't stand was Bodie's tendency to create lists. She would sometimes stop the (already drawn-out) plot to go through a list of crimes committed against women or men who did horrific things and dodged consequences. I understand what feelings these were meant to invoke in me, and I understand that it was meant to be powerful. Do you see how all these women are connected? How what is happening to Thalia and Omar (not Bodie) is part of a larger pattern? Again, yes, I do. But instead of a powerful moment of storytelling, this just felt cheap. Nothing says "the next great feminist novel" like stealing other women's stories, casting aside their actual identities, and using them as props for shock value. You know where the author should've actually been getting graphic and disturbing details from? Her own murder mystery. Focus less on repurposing the trauma of other women and actually write a book.

There were many other aspects of this book that I found unimpressive. The hypocrisy of the writing compared to the intended political messaging alone could be another few paragraphs. But I'm tired of thinking about this book. In writing this review, I feel like I've put more thought into the writing than the author did, and I don't care to spend more time unpacking a book that had such little thought put into it.

This book delivered on almost nothing that it promised. The only thing I think it did well was the setting. I'm a sucker for a dark academia/murdery-school-in-the-woods vibe, and for the most part, I thought the author set the scene really well. But that's not enough to make a book good.