Starred review from November 7, 2022
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. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc.
Starred review from June 10, 2024
Makkai (The Great Believers) delivers an emotionally complex story about the costs and rewards of seeking the truth. Bodie Kane always felt like an outsider at Granby, the prestigious boarding school she attended in the mid-1990s. She both envied and disdained the lives of the privileged students who gathered around the magnetic Thalia Keith. When Bodie returns to Granby in 2018, those old feelings return as she grapples with the impact of the #MeToo movement and the questionable circumstances around Thalia's death. Julia Whelan masterfully embodies the messy realities of Bodie as a woman whose successful career and loving family project a portrait her self-image can't match. Bodie's practiced podcaster smoothness devolves into fear and shaking rage as she contemplates how she and her classmates were encouraged to put up with casual violations by the boys and men around them. Whelan is equally adept at voicing secondary characters, matching her tones and cadence to cocky athletes and sensitive theater kids alike. JD Jackson makes a brief but pivotal appearance as the man who was swiftly and perhaps wrongfully convicted of Thalia's murder. VERDICT Highly recommended for all audio collections; for lovers of contemporary literary fiction and true crime podcasts.--Natalie Marshall
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