Book Review: "I Have Some Questions For You" by Rebecca Makkai

Now the reason I found this book was again, as always, it was in my Amazon Recommendations. However, when I read the blurb of it, I kind of wondered why since when I bought the book I was sort of on a horror binge. This book was very clearly a crime novel. Initially I was against reading a crime novel purely because I was either reading horror novels that were twisted and folkish or I was doom-reading myself into political philosophy oblivion. Ultimately, I decided to give it a go because it was cheap (used) and the book was nice and big. Spanning over 400 pages and in a hardback meant that it was a nice book to snuggle up with on a weekend morning before I had to get up.

This book is about a woman named Bodie who is teaching a class and has assigned for them to write a podcast. This drags her back into the world of high school where she was a boarder sharing a room with a girl who would soon be a murder victim. The man who was arrested is called Omar and worked at the school as a janitor. Years later though, Bodie is not so sure that this was the way it truly happened and for a long time is set upon another person who may have been the culprit. As she works her way through it, she discusses the case with old friends and pulls in other people from her past so that she might piece together bits that were previously forgotten or deleted purposefully.

One thing I enjoyed about this book is that every now and again in the novel there was a chapter dedicated to a character who Bodie believes is the new prime suspect. She goes through the chapter in second person (speaking to 'you' as if the character is standing right in front of her) and tries to map out how they would have committed the murder. This lets her revisit the scene, times and places that this person was in and gives the reader an insight into Bodie's thought process about the murder case. These people include the man already in prison for the murder, the boyfriend, various friends and even the 'you' of the book which is a man she has suspected from the beginning. One of the chapters is even about Bodie herself and whether she may have just deleted the memory of doing it. It is the only chapter of this kind where she refers to the first person.

The rest of the text is written in first person and I liked the mingling of different storylines about the same thing. We have a whirlwind produced in Bodie's private life in the fact her ex-partner is embroiled in a possible sexual coercion case in which he is being accused of coersive control towards a younger woman. I liked how each of these pieces try to make the reader see what we are not seeing in Bodie's life, and yet we don't realise it at all until the end of the book. The writing hides and reveals things so well that we do not realise that we too, are getting caught up in this sense of mob justice which is more than often perpetuated by various kinds of media - including social media and podcasts.

Another thing I thought was pretty well done in this book is that it doesn't overload itself with characters, but zooms in on key ones that play a vital role to the plot, leaving everyone else as a background character with not much personality. It makes the book easier to read and we don't need a notebook to keep track of everyone. I enjoyed the way these characters were woven together to each have very particular flaws so that when we meet them, almost anyone is a suspect. Each person, including Bodie herself, is a character of interest due to the fact they have a strange issue with attachment, they are deviants, they are doing something else illegal in the text or they have an issue with control. This lets the reader know how difficult things are going to become for Bodie. It also makes the ending hit us harder than it should. It was fantastic.

All in all, I thought the book was a great find in literature. I wanted to go back and start it again because I didn't want to feel I'd missed anything in this great investigation. Tearing up the old wounds and floorboards all sounds great until Bodie scratches beneath the surface to find an even more disturbing and uncomfortable truth about the case of murder. It teaches us a great lesson about what we think might be the truth and what the truth actually is.