A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith.
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?

This book seems to be absolute marmite - you either love it, or you hate it.

Well, I absolutely loved it.

Some of the criticism is that it was too dragged out, that nothing really happens, that nothing really gets resolved - and you know what? I could not care less. I would have gladly read 500 pages more.

I was completely engrossed in the story. The depiction of girlhood rang so true to me - I swear my teenage angst came back.

What a great novel.

I was excited to pick up I Have Some Questions For You because of its campus setting and original-sounding plot. I particularly enjoyed its blend of page-turning plot and characterisation. It is rare to find a "literary" novel that explores contemporary issues in some depth whilst still keeping the reader hooked with a mysterious "whodunnit" but Rebecca Makkai achieves just that, with the final act bringing events to a satisfying close. Many of the plot strands are ripped straight from the headlines and this is a particularly interesting exploration of power dynamics, social media and the #MeToo movement so this book would provide plenty of fodder for a book club discussion.

It felt to me like this book would make an excellent companion to other "campus" novels like The Secret History by Donna Tartt, "Prep" by Curtis Sittenfeld, "My Dark Vanessa" by Kate Elizabeth Russell and "We Were Villains" by M.L. Rio (all of which I've highly enjoyed). However, I think it would also be of interest to those who enjoyed "Death of a Bookseller" by Alice Slater, which explores the ethics of true crime fandom. Either way, there is plenty of food for thought and much to keep readers turning the pages late into the night.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for a free advance copy of I Have Some Questions For You in exchange for an honest review.

An intriguing premise, but the storyline fell flat. Felt that we meandered too much such that the book lost the element of suspense it was building towards. Also, the COVID-19 continuation felt a bit contrived.

This book was so boring. I gave up at 35%. I did try and push through but I just couldn’t connect with it at all.

Well, I am starting 2024 with a BANG!
I absolutely LOVED everything about this book. The writing style was beautiful, it was super fast paced and gripping, which was a great follow up from my last read. I wanted to know what happened in this boarding school back in 1995. As the story unravels, you realise that the truth doesn't really matter and that above all, Rebecca Makkai explores misogyny, gender-based violence, girlhood and the aches of adolescence, our obsession with true crime, body image, the justice system not being very just (aka hello systemic racism) trauma and more. It also spans 20 + years and it's so interesting to see the context and societies we live in evolve.
Thank you Netgalley for the ARC (that I'm only getting round to reading now, but the paperback is out in the UK real soon, so I guess it works out??)

Highly recommend!

It was around a decade ago that I read Rebecca Makkai's The Borrower and certain passages from the closing pages still resonate in my mind. Her clear belief in the power of books to shine a light in the darkest of places is one that I share wholeheartedly. Somehow or other though, I never got round to reading any of her follow-up work until now. I Have Some Questions For You made me feel that this is something which I need to remedy urgently. It is not only one of the most thoughtful takes on issues around #MeToo but also a fascinating exploration of how we relate to our past selves.

2018: Bodie Kane is forty years old and returning to the elite boarding school which she attended twenty years previously. On the surface, she is there to teach a class on podcasting. On the level below, she is going there to be casually 'in the area' of the man who is her casual lover in the wake of her separation from her artist husband. On the level below that however, she has some questions. Questions that are difficult to admit to and which simultaneously nobody and everybody want to have answered.

For much of Bodie's time at Granby, she felt like an outcast. Family tragedy had left her adrift and alone. It is the kindness of Mormon neighbours who happen to be alumni that Bodie is even able to attend the school in the first place. Grieving and angry, Bodie found it difficult to integrate. And yet it is also clear that the relationships which she made at school have been important ties throughout her life. Which brings us to the biggest question of all. As a junior, Bodie was roommates with Thalia Keith and then the following year, Thalia was found dead in the school swimming pool. The black athletics coach Omar Evans was convicted of her murder and has been in prison ever since. Still, online chatter has long queried the safety of the conviction and when one of Bodie's students decides to make her podcast for the class about the case, Bodie cannot restrain herself any longer.

From her arrival at Granby, Bodie addresses her narration to 'you'. Gradually it becomes clear who is the object of her internal narration. The erstwhile music teacher Denny Bloch has long since departed Granby but back in the 1990s, Bodie worked as a stagehand on several of his productions. She felt he understood her. She also suspected that he was grooming her roommate Thalia for sex. She is uncomfortably aware that she has set the stage for her students to explore Thalia's death as a way of examining her own doubts over Omar's conviction by proxy.

Makkai has scored a masterstroke in how she pitches the relationship between Bodie and Thalia. I shared a room during my first year at university and Makkai has captured perfectly that blurred linebetween intimacy and distance which sums up so much of those arrangements. Poles apart on the social pecking order, Bodie and Thalia rubbed along together without ever being friends. But Bodie gained glimpses of Thalia that nobody else did. And where Thalia has faded after all these years into just another doomed dead girl, perhaps Bodie cares enough to seek justice.

Just the same, Bodie is a cleverly ambiguous creation. The podcasting student Britt comments on the problematic nature of the true crime genre and how it all too often fixates on dead women. All of the events in Granby unhappily coincide with Bodie's estranged husband being 'cancelled' for his behaviour in a past relationship, a mess which drags Bodie down too. Even Bodie herself feels uncertain whether she is seeking out the 'truth' about Thalia to rescue her own career or if it is for more noble intentions.

All of this got me thinking. True crime podcasts have surged in popularity but I have never really gotten into any of them. They always seem to be about violence against women. And this made me think of Jo Baker's The Body Lies and how the female corpse is such a popular prop in fiction. What I liked in this novel was that Makkai granted her dead girl a voice. Thalia was not just the girl found dead in the pool. She was also the girl who sang in the mornings while she got dressed behind the wardrobe door. Strange how this detail made her seem alive to me.

But the passages which resonated most of all for me were Bodie's ruminations on Thalia's likely relationship with Mr Bloch. Looking back as a woman in her forties, Bodie can see it far more clearly as abusive. It is an interesting alternative perspective to My Dark Vanessa, another boarding school novel about a predatory teacher. Looking at the students in her podcasting class, Bodie considers all the ways that they are still children. She comments on how they are still learning about washing their clothes regularly, maintaining hygiene, the basic tasks of self-care. They have, Bodie observes, far more in common with the twelve year olds that they were four years ago than the twenty year olds that they will be four years hence. We forget this when we watch teen dramas where the characters are played by adults in their mid to late twenties.

But another aspect of I Have Some Questions was around how we remember our schoolmates. Bodie looked at the rich kids of Granby and felt hopelessly out of place. She saw Thalia's friends and saw the 'popular crowd'. My own small British high school had a similar faction. They were the girls with perfect make-up, the ones having high drama relationships, the ones who really did seem like miniature adults. But Bodie realises when she encounters them again that their high school experiences had been no less uncomfortable than her own. It was triggering to read about these fully-grown women in their forties describing ass in their teens they felt like they had to just laugh along in the face of sexual harassment. I remember being scolded by friends when I poked one of their friends in the eye after he tried to put his hand up my skirt. He had been 'just joking' and I needed to stop being such a kill-joy.

A strong theme in I Have Some Questions comes from how far we trust our own memories. I remember a few years ago, someone started an Instagram account chronicling the experiences of sexual assault survivors at my old university. I shared a link to an old friend - was it really like this when we went there? He pointed out that there had always been incidents where this or that guy would get a bit inappropriate after everyone was drinking but that 'back then' nobody thought anything more about it. And when I thought about it, I realised that I could think of several uncomfortable incidents that I had previously dismissed. Bodie considers the accusations against her estranged husband and sees them as petty and pathetic. But to the person who makes the accusations? Who knows.

Why did we have to pretend that these experiences were funny? And when the students sniggered along as teenage bully Dorian humiliated Bodie with sexual slurs, was it a step along the way to them permitting more violent acts against women? Rape? Murder? Where is the point that we stop being annoying kill-joys who have no sense of humour and are allowed to admit that a crime is being committed?

Peppered through the novel are hallucinatory passages beginning with 'the one'. The one where she vanished on her senior trip to Aruba. The one where they never found the bodies but for years there were rumours that their last moments had been captured on Polaroid. The one where an off duty police officer tricked her into thinking that she had broken a COVID-19 lockdown order, handcuffed her and drove her eighty miles, killed her and burned her body. The one where she vanished on her way to school. The one where her grandmother's boyfriend killed her. The one where she was just walking home. And the other one where she was just walking home. And the next. The point that Makkai is making - and myself as well as the above are just the first few that I can think of off the top of my head - is that violence against women is constant. And worse, the stories get swapped around like trading cards. Bonus points for extra gore. Double bonus if there is rape involved.

The latter 2022 section felt like a jarring change in pace. Events related to Britt's podcast have led to Omar Evans getting a retrial. We are kept at a distance from what exactly about it that whipped up such a storm. Bodie describes a crucial moment in it, noting 'You have to understand, with the music underneath, this was quite powerful.' Instead we get it at secondhand. But it is never really about the podcast itself, more how the podcast shines a light on those two stolen lives, Thalia Keith and Omar Evans.

In some ways, Makkai is making some very obvious statements when she describes the Hell that Omar has been through, is living through and all the losses he has suffered along the way. It should not be news to anyone that the system fails Black men. But still, it is worth repeating nice and loud for those at the back. Makkai is not serving up any fairytale notions of justice. The question lingers whether the students' podcast has doing anything truly meaningful for Omar. Does true crime and online chatter have any impact in the real world? It is Twitter which takes down Bodie's husband but can it sway the legal system?  Can a podcast truly put right a miscarriage of justice? Bodie may be the one asking the questions but she left me with more than a few of my own.

Makkai wisely suspends judgement and allows the reader to make up their minds for themselves. Bodie remembers a friend remarking that they tried to fill their young daughter with confidence but that it felt rather like fattening a pig for slaughter since when they hit twelve, they would have to deal with the horrors of adolescence. In a similar way, Makkai seems to want to leave her reader with some vestiges of hope for the future. Vital evidence may be found. Witnesses may come forward. Sometimes things do work out. Innocent people can be set free. Similar to Charlotte Brontë's Villette, there is some space for us to believe in a possible happier ending if that is what we want to reach out for. As with The Borrower, this book left me feeling thoroughly rattled. There are no comfortable answers to Makkai's questions but just the same, it feels important that they are asked.

This book was so good! It follows Bodie, a successful film professor, who is invited back to her boarding school to teach a short course. She is hesitant as whilst at this school years earlier a fellow student was murdered and the school's athletics coach was convicted and put in prison but Bodie has been determined to leave all of this behind. She goes though and in her class the students are making podcasts and want to investigate this murder, and Bodie herself is drawn back into what happened back then and wondering if the right person was convicted. Alongside this there is a scandal with Bodie's husband that she's dealing with and this is swirling around her as she's going back over her past. I found this such an engrossing novel, it's a slow burn and very detailed at times but that made is all the move believable to me. I did find this a little difficult to get in to but once I was into it I found it hard to put down. This is a haunting novel and one that I highly recommend!

I really enjoyed this mystery/thriller. Whilst I found the main character a bit unlikeable, I felt that actually added to the experience of getting to know her and gave it a level of authenticity. The self reflection the main character underwent felt more honest and raw than in most thrillers and the pace throughout the book was great. The conclusion felt a little muddled but overall I enjoyed the book!

"It was the one where she was young enough and white enough and pretty enough and rich enough that people paid attention."

In 1995, teenager Thalia Keith died on the campus of an elite boarding school in New Hampshire. An athletics coach, Omar, was arrested and imprisoned for the murder. Bodie Kane, now a successful podcast host and lecturer, has returned to the school for two weeks to teach film and podcasting classes. As the weight of her former roommate's murder weighs on her mind, she reminisces about her time at the school and the possibility that the wrong man has been imprisoned.

Meanwhile, Bodie's personal life isn't great - her somewhat estranged husband has been cancelled online, and Bodie's income is at risk. As her obsession with Thalia's murder grows, and one of her students deciding to do a deep dive into the case, Bodie is forced to re-examine every aspect of the night Thalia died, and the events leading up to it.

With echoes of dark academia and several true crime podcasts, Rebecca Makkai has crafted a dark, addictive tale of how we consume true crime and how retrospective reflection can completely change the way we see an incident. Jerome's "cancellation" asks questions about how two truths can exist simultaneously, and the media element makes us look at how we consume true crime as entertainment:

"I'm queasy, at the same time, about the way they've become public property, subject to the collective imagination."

Although this was a fairly hefty book (almost 450 pages), it was a fast read. I think the skip ahead in timelines was a little fast compared to the first half of the book. I was left wanting more with regard to what had actually happened between 2018 and 2022.

Thank you to @littlebrownbookgroup_uk for the ARC via Netgalley.

Rebecca Makkai is astonishing - a brilliant author. My favourite book of hers is The Great Believers, and whilst this is wholly different both in terms of content and tone, it's nonetheless a brilliant, gripping read. Makkai seems to innately understand people - the people in this book aren't characters, they feel real

I enjoyed, but wasn't mad about, The Great Believers, so I wasn't sure whether to take a chance on Rebecca Makkai's next novel - but I'm so glad I did! I Have Some Questions for You is a brilliantly crafted examination of true crime entertainment. What has stayed with me most since reading this book was the clever way it would keep drawing you into the 'true crime' puzzle, making you fall into the same traps of speculation as the characters, before bluntly reminding you over and over that (in-universe) this was a real and recent tragedy with no easy answers. I was completely compelled to guess at answers, then made to feel horrified with myself for my complicity! Genius.

I really was looking forward to this book but finished disappointed. Anything of real interest was buried under 6 feet of unnecessary information. As an example There is an almost cultish desire to put the pandemic into any contemporary novel - why? it has no significance to the events which took place long before . I spent huge amounts of time wishing the author would just get to the point. The end did not justify the roundabout way the author got there

This novel is based on a fictitious murder in 1994 at Granby College, North Hampshire where a man has been imprisoned of a girl’s murder but who may be innocent. It is however more a character study of damaged adolescents most of whom we have described by the narrator who only offers ‘the short version of the truth’ of themself and those other characters.

I did struggle with this novel at times due to the number of extraneous characters and the changing timelines which slows down the story and prevents any real energy developing. The novel is in two parts with the first taking up 3/4 of the novel, leaving the last section in the present day feeling rushed and implausible. Three stars.

What a joy from start to finish. I couldn't stop reading this fantastic book. I have some questions for you deals with topics that are very current at the moment and at times I didn't know what to believe.

The blurb for I Have Some Questions For You sounded right up my street, so I wanted to love it more than I did. While brilliantly written, the story tried to do too much, and Rebeca Makkai didn’t quite pull it off.

When film professor and podcaster Bodie Kane is invited back to the boarding school she attended to teach podcasting, one of her students decides to reexamine the murder of Thalia Keith, Bodie’s classmate and one-time roommate.

Told across two timelines, the present day and Bodie’s school days in the 1990s, I Have Some Questions For You grapples with some heavy themes, including the ethics of true crime as entertainment, the Me Too movement, cancel culture, and racial bias in the US criminal justice system. Makkai handles some of these themes better than others.

The storyline I had the biggest issue with is challenging to discuss in detail because although it is a subplot, I don’t want to include spoilers. What I will say is that while there is a case to be made that the vagueness, lack of clarity or any real sense of resolution that I found so frustrating is an accurate portrayal of how these experiences play out in real life and on social media, I do not think Makkai gave this storyline the attention required for this conclusion to work.

On a sentence level, Makkai’s writing is beautiful. But by the end, I wasn’t invested in any of the characters or how the main story was resolved.

Really struggled with this one. Had high hopes to begin with but haven’t been able to get into it at all. Found myself losing track with the story and not feeling invested in the characters and so felt to long as well.

Rebecca Makkai is an author that has been on my radar for awhile now but this me too, which explores notions of privileges, abuse, type of narrative has been done before and better.

I absolutely adored this campus novel. The narrator - and her style of addressing this to an initially unknown second person - was a really interesting character.

The historic mystery, and the cast of characters, left me unable to put this novel down.

Makkai has a real knack for creating a strong sense of place. Her descriptions of the historic boarding school where this is set were pitch perfect.

I was so looking forward to reading I Have Some Questions For You but due to the formatting- random numbers on every line of the text- I wasn't able to comfortably read more than a few chapters. I have downloaded the audio version to listen to instead.
It is therefore difficult to rate this novel, so please read others reviews for a fairer and more balanced view.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this digital ARC.

Took too long to start with the result that I abandoned it at 9%. Doom-laden foreshadowings at the end of every chapter become increasingly irritating when no chapter (so far) addresses the promised plot - i.e., a murder twenty years ago in a boarding school. All I know about the victim after an hour of reading is her first name. I don't know how she died, why she died, why I should care about her dying, why Bodie (our whiny "I've been a poor little misfit all my life" first-person narrator) seems obsessed by her death.

Even in that short space of time, however, the author had managed to annoy me by pointedly making "points", and then spelling them out in case her readers were too dull to pick up on them. For example, on being asked who's looking after her children while she works, instead of allowing the reader to shake her head at the obvious, if clichéd, sexism inherent in that question, Bodie tells us that it's sexist and why, in case we missed it.

"When Lance and I toured for Starlet Fever, people would often ask me where my children were, how they felt about my absence, how my husband felt about it - but they never asked Lance, who had three kids."

If the author must make "points", at least she could try to make them a bit more subtle or original, or make them in an interesting way. And one can't help wondering if her "points" really require to be made at all, since they are the same points every other politically correct, look at me I'm so liberal, author has been churning out in every book for the last decade.