BookLife Review: I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai
murder mystery, podcasting, boarding school, New Hampshire, sexual assault
In need of a whodunit for the summer? I Have Some Questions For You may be the one to grab. Author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Great Believers (yes, on the to-read and to-be-reviewed list), Rebecca Makkai delivers a page turner. Complete with a few decoys, and the requisite couple of twists, the mystery is set in New Hampshire (popular setting these days for several books) at a private boarding school, Granby. The protagonist is an almost-orphaned, sort-of-foster woman who attended the school as a teen, and is haunted by the senior year death of her not-a-friend roommate. Then an outsider, Bodie returns to the school to teach two winter term classes, one on podcasting (her current profession) and one on the history of film. Her bff from her student years, Fran, is now a teacher at the school, a voice of reason and a literary sounding board.
Bodie is a true-crime podcast professional, the clear implication being that the traumatic death of her roommate drove that calling. Bodie has doubts about whether the right man was convicted of the crime. Makkai uses an unusual first and second voice point of view, often directing her thoughts and findings to a “You” who we soon learn is a former admired music teacher whom she strongly suspects was in a forbidden relationship with the deceased Thalia Keith, and therefore is a suspect. Bodie’s return to Granby is in part a quest to answer her unsolved lingering questions and doubts. Of course (and a bit conveniently) one of the students in the podcasting course elects Thalia’s murder (and the rumored wrongful conviction of athletic trainer and person of color, Omar) as the subject of her student podcasting project. Bodie is drawn in, barely resisting. She works systematically through possible scenarios, as she and the students dive in and identify new information and evidence. This is a page-turner and just in time for the extended daylight of summer reading!