FICTION

I Have Some Questions for You

Viking. Feb. 2023. 448p. ISBN 9780593490143. $28. F
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California-based podcaster/professor Bodie Kane has been invited to teach some mini-courses at Granby, the New Hampshire coed boarding school she attended as a teenager. Bodie’s podcasting students are aware of her notoriety during her student days—she was the roommate of Thalia Keith, who was murdered on campus in the mid-1990s—and they want to reopen the case for their class project. The initial investigation was sloppy at best. Omar, the Black athletic director at the time, was convicted of the murder, based partly on a questionable statement Bodie made to the police. Omar has been in prison ever since. Now, 23 years later, an uneasy Bodie and her students conduct a deep dive into Thalia’s complicated relationships with students and faculty as they all dig for more clues. Getting in the way of the truth are the secrets that all the key players, including Bodie, have been keeping for decades.
VERDICT Pulitzer Prize finalist Makkai (The Great Believers) knows whereof she writes; she lives on the campus of the boarding school she attended as a teenager, where her husband now teaches and her child is a student. Her lifelong, three-pronged immersion in that culture has resulted in a thought-provoking and delicious tale of life and death and justice that very well may have gone sideways.
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