I Have Some Questions for You

Audiobook

English language

Published Feb. 21, 2023 by Books on Tape.

ISBN:: 978-0-593-67068-2

(1 review)

The riveting new novel - “part true-crime page-turner, part campus coming-of-age” (San Francisco Chronicle) - from the author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Great Believers

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 …

The riveting new novel - “part true-crime page-turner, part campus coming-of-age” (San Francisco Chronicle) - from the author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Great Believers

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.

6 editions

Sharyl reviewed I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

Beautifully Written Mystery

4 stars

This is more than a story about a mystery. It’s a beautifully written depiction of life at a small boarding school, a microcosm in the woods. What happened there, amongst the students, was not beautiful, but the way Bodie Kane looks back on some important events, as an adult, is well expressed. Much of the novel is written to someone offstage, a character the reader will learn much more about along the way.

Bodie, a successful podcaster, has returned to the Granby School, the boarding school where she spent her vulnerable teen-aged years, for a few weeks to teach a class. When she asks her students to choose a topic to investigate for their own podcast projects, one of them expresses the interest to delve into a murder that happened at the school while Bodie was a student there, decades ago. It’s a crime for which a man named Omar …

This is more than a story about a mystery. It’s a beautifully written depiction of life at a small boarding school, a microcosm in the woods. What happened there, amongst the students, was not beautiful, but the way Bodie Kane looks back on some important events, as an adult, is well expressed. Much of the novel is written to someone offstage, a character the reader will learn much more about along the way.

Bodie, a successful podcaster, has returned to the Granby School, the boarding school where she spent her vulnerable teen-aged years, for a few weeks to teach a class. When she asks her students to choose a topic to investigate for their own podcast projects, one of them expresses the interest to delve into a murder that happened at the school while Bodie was a student there, decades ago. It’s a crime for which a man named Omar is serving time, and also a controversial subject matter, since there are many people who believe the investigation was flawed, and conspiracy theories abound on social media.

Bodie is both pleased and a bit scared at the prospect of getting into this subject matter. It’s been on her mind, something about her past that won’t stay buried. In the meantime, Bodie has her own complicated life to deal with, along with resurfacing memories of the events that happened around the time of Thalia Keith’s murder.

In the years since this tragic event, society’s values have shifted and the world is very different, largely because of social media and an increased awareness of social injustices. So, the time seems to be right to look at this case again.

This is a fascinating story, and I was intrigued almost as much about the flawed perceptions the students of the 1990s had about each other as I was about the obviously flawed justice system. This novel does not tie things up in a neat bow, and I admire that, also.

Thank you very much to Netgalley and Penguin Group Viking for sharing this novel with me!

Lists

Libby Awards for 2023