I hate reading reviews on Goodreads, to be honest. I hate finishing a book I couldn’t set down and checking the app to see three star reviews filled with “it just didn’t work for me” or, worse, “I didn’t like the main character at all” as if it’s a requirement for a book to only have characters we’d want to be friends with, as if a character we don’t exactly like can’t also help us look at the world from a new angle. It takes me back to 9th grade, a depressed kid reading Catcher in the Rye for the first time, hearing kids talk about how whiny Holden was. I’d never argue he was likable, or that we should adopt his world view, but as a lonely kid who was watching his brother struggle with drug abuse, something about a depressed kid who just lost his brother helped me feel just a little bit less alone in that feeling.
The most infuriating review to read, is when a year or more of an author’s life, writing and struggling to get a work published, culminates with a one-star review simply saying, “not good.” There was a video they showed us in school when I was a kid, maybe elementary, of everything it takes in the supply chain to grow bread. Planting the wheat seed, tending the field as the crop grew, harvesting the wheat, processing it into flour, shipping it to the bakery that mixed it all up with the right ingredients to make dough, kneading it, letting it rise, kneading it again, baking the bread, and slicing it up. The video ends with someone buying the bread at a supermarket, putting it in the toaster, and burning the bread. They take the blackened slices out, and throw it in the garbage.
Quite often, that’s how I feel about reviews. There’s nothing wrong with the bread, you just burnt the toast.
This is all how I felt when I finished I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai. She’s an author who was once a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, a fantastic storyteller on a scale I can’t even imagine. The story is a fictional true crime that calls us out on our fetishization of true crime, not directly, but through the characters. In the same breath it gives credence to revisiting wrongful convictions, how easily things can go wrong in the justice system, and how hard it is to seek recompense when they do.
I wouldn’t say it’s a comfortable read either. Huge warning that sexual assault and the discourse around it is a recurring theme throughout the book, and reads heartbreakingly true, especially the tiny bits of online discourse injected in. The main character is a survivor, but still has flaws in how she reacts to other characters’ experiences throughout the book. Every character is flawed in this book, and I find that to be an indication of a remarkable author.
On top of all of this heavy material, Makkai manages to weave a surprising amount of humor that brings some much needed levity and keeps the pages turning. One page you’re horrified, the next you’re in a rage, and the next you’re laughing. I really don’t know how she did it, but I wish I did so I could bottle it up and use it myself.
All of this to say that I took a gander at Goodreads after finishing the book, and I was really disappointed by what I saw. I think anyone who thinks this book is a middle of the pack 3 star book is dead wrong, and I’m entitled to that opinion, just as they’re entitled to theirs. This novel is brilliant. Maybe it isn’t a true-to-form mystery novel, or a real thriller, or as distracting as a lighthearted romance (not that distractions are bad, I love distracting myself, and often need to), but it is brilliant. The note of dissonance that stays with you after you finish the last page is a testament to that brilliance.
Some of the many things that stick with me are the small lists of men who committed crimes, or the women who were victimized, laid out like a drumbeat cadence. They stand out to me because they speak to how precariously rare it is to find true justice for women victimized by assault and murder.
“There was once a man they caught because he claimed he hadn’t left the state–but the dead bugs on the windshield of his rental car could only have come from outside California.
There was a man they caught because he’d ordered the knife on Amazon.
There was a man they caught because his name was on the Starbucks cup in her trash.
There was a man who was told that his wife’s body had been found in the woods. He arrived on the scene and instead of running towards the police tape, he ran to the exact spot where he’d left her body.”