Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for a proof copy of this book!

This was everything I needed to get me out of a stress induced reading rut. Really pacey, gripping and intelligent, dark but socially aware - think My Dark Vanessa with a true crime element. The writing was great and really funny, the characters were interesting and believable. I really loved the element of an elitist boarding school which played into issues of class and race as well as being a really fun setting for the plot.

The only thing is that the ending fell slightly flat for me - I really had no idea what was going to happen right up until the end and it wasn’t quite right in my opinion. But that being said, I loved everything right up until the final 5%!

Would still really recommend if you’re looking for something to get you hooked!

How much can an author fit into a book? The answer in the case of Makkai’s splendid offering is a lot!

Bodie Kane, producer of a hit podcast, has been invited back to Granby, the elite New Hampshire boarding school she graduated from in 1995, to teach a course on podcasting during the two-week “mini-mester” of January 2018. But this return to the school is not as straightforward as it seems.

Bodie gives her students examples of topics for their podcast, but top of the list is the murder of her classmate Thalia Keith, which occurred in the spring of their senior year on the night of the school musical. A Black man who worked for the school as an athletic trainer was convicted and imprisoned for the murder of a wealthy white student. Doubts have fueled interest in the case ever since, including a 2005 episode of Dateline and a website promoting the view that the boyfriend did it, robbieserenhoisguilty.com.

Bodie and the student’s investigations unearth various concerns around the case, but while this is going on, Bodie faces problems closer to home - a #MeToo type scandal breaks in her own life, involving her ex husband, a well-known visual artist.

As if that isn’t enough for Bodie, she is forced to confront her Granby related demons. Brodie spent a troubled youth: how she was affected by her disastrous childhood and her connection to a favourite teacher who, on reflection, was undoubtedly a predator.

Punctuating the story with lists of references to familiar crimes—“the one where” this or that happened - placing the fictional murder in a societal context of violence against women and obsession with true crime. I am interested in true crime, but Makkai makes very valid points regarding exploiting people for entertainment and objectifying victims who mostly fit one demographic - pretty, white, rich, and young.

Bodie tells her story through a powerful narrative which she addresses to a “you” she is obviously furious with.

This is a stunningly written, highly immersive book with excellent character development and a compelling, well constructed plot 4.5⭐️

I received a free egalley of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a review.

I picked this up because I loved Rebecca Makkai's last book The Great Believers and this seemed to tick so many of my boxes (boarding schools! true crime podcasts!). Our protagonist, Bodie, returns to teach at her old boarding school, where her classmate Thalia was murdered in 1995. While an athletics coach was charged with the murder, the case is still hotly debated, and one of Bodie's students creates a podcast about it. As Bodie becomes reacquainted with her old environment and old faces, she faces up to her own suspicions about what really happened.

This is not really a straightforward mystery/thriller, but more of an exploration of the true crime genre, #metoo, and that feeling you get when you look back at things that happened to you when you're a teenager and think "well that was fucked up." I really enjoyed those aspects of the novel, to the point where I was kind of uninterested in the actual resolution to the mystery. As is often the case, by the time I got there it fell a little flat for me. I'm also inevitably, unfairly, going to compare this to The Great Believers, which I found to be a deeper, more emotionally affecting book than this one. Still, I really enjoyed this! I'm definitely looking forward to whatever Makkai does next.

genuinely remarkable, clever and incisive. excellently paced and so engaging. will check out makkai's other works

Makkai writes brilliantly. I’ve loved her previous books and was worried this one would disappoint - but I should never have been concerned. It’s a triumph. Brilliant written and paced, I loved every page.

After reading a few books with the same boarding school setting, I was excited to start this one, hoping it would go heavier on the sleuthing and lighter on the trauma. Well, better luck next time. I wish Makkai had leaned wayyyy more into the detectiving aspect. I wanted old secrets burried in the walls, sneaky interviews with old staff, an actual amateur investigation. What I got was Bodie extensively internally ruminating on what other people had discovered. Throughout, she remained a passive onlooker who gave unimportant, drawn-out context about her peers from back in their school days. That was her whole role in this.

I think the author & editor should have done away with Part 1 entirely and have Bodie be confronted with her old biases and assumptions about people during the court hearing. Her old classmates would have been in town for that, we could have had flashbacks triggered by run-ins w them and we would have gotten a far better sense of their relationships and prejudices against one another. We didn't need Bodie to be at school to walk w her step by step as she inspires a student podcast abt the case. This was irrelevant and could have easily been background info given in a couple of pages. That way the book would have had a much clearer direction. As is, it feels muddled.

While the writing style is mostly easy and engaging, there is simply too much of it. 100 pages could have been cut easily.
I did like the cast of characters though. Most of them were only superficially explored but they were likable and believable.

Tl;dr:
A mixed bag.
Would recommend for people who enjoy ruminations on their teen years and fucked up high school reunions.

If you like literary thrillers, dark academia and true crime podcasts, then this is the book for you. I Have Some Questions For You from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Makkai combines deft writing, detailed storytelling, a murder mystery and sharp takes on cancel culture and true crime.

Bodie Kane is a successful podcaster and film professor who, when invited back to her former boarding school Granby in New Hampshire to facilitate a two-week course, becomes inexorably drawn into the 1995 case of her former classmate Thalia's murder.

Although the case was prosecuted (Black sports coach Omar was convicted of Thalia's murder), it has been the subject of much online speculation and the way in which the case was resolved has never sat well with Bodie. As she begins to dig deeper, and as her own life begins to come at her fast with her ex-husband embroiled in controversy, Bodie ends up on a irreversible path of her own in an attempt to reclaim her past.

At 448 pages, the author packs in a lot and if anything, I felt it could have been a little longer as there were elements of Bodie's childhood that merited further depth. That's a testament to how much I enjoyed the book. The pacing is excellent, never racing ahead or slackening, just perfectly taut.

Reading about online amateur sleuthing at the same time as police were warning the public to stay out of the Nicola Bulley case, made me uneasy at times. True crime as a genre feels horribly voyeuristic and yet it's often only through the persistence and objectivity of strangers that injustices are overcome. There's a balance to be struck though.

With this book, superb world-building and characterisation by Makkai makes for a really enjoyable, immersive and thought-provoking reading experience. The writing is magnificent, always sharp and never overdone. A mash up of The Secret History, Prep and Serial. Recommended. 4-4.5/5 stars

*Many thanks to the author, publisher @littlebrownuk and @netgalley for the arc. I Have Some Questions For You will be published on Thursday 23 February 2023. As always, this is an honest review.*

I first discovered Rebecca Makkai in 2020 when I read her 2018 AIDS-era novel “The Great Believers” in one of the grimmest periods of lockdown. I described the sensation of “feeling purged by the end but with the sense that I had received a tremendous reading experience.” It ended up as my Book Of The Year. This, her 5th novel is the first since then.
It features a first-person narrative by Bodie Kane, a girl who found herself, due to unusual circumstances, as an outsider in an elite boarding school in the 1990s. Her narrative is set in the present day and is addressed to one of her old teachers. As an adult Bodie has never been able to move far away from the murder of an ex-room-mate, found drowned after a late-night visit to the pool. Twenty-three years later she is back at the school teaching a podcast course and one of the students is manipulated by Bodie into re-examining the case.
This is a privileged American academic world largely within two time-zones, when Bodie was a student and then as a visiting staff member. Since then, much has happened- different attitudes, MeToo and cancel culture means the later intake are a very different set of students, less accepting of the young Bodie’s environment and in the meantime a black man has been languishing in prison accused of a murder that an online community, which Bodie is very much a part of, seems never totally convinced he committed.
The three time settings gives a clever slant. The three levels of looking back all presented in a form of an address to a member of staff Bodie had not seen since schooldays provides a fascinating set of perspectives. As this structure demands, it is a very tight, controlled piece with lots of ruminations of the same events all stemming back to a one night after a school production of “Camelot”. I can, as a British reader, find writing set in American educational establishments rather distancing- it’s such a different world and there was a point where I felt my interest would wane but a leap forward to the post-Covid world regained my enthusiasm.
Within the narrative there is a nifty use of references to cases of abuse and murder, in an off-hand, suggestive manner, for example, she relates listening to a radio news item at one point and mentions was it the one where such and such happened, or the one where…or the one where.. This happens quite a few times within the text and is a sobering reminder that the case that Bodie experienced is one of so many where violence has destroyed lives.
I was impressed and involved but not in the same way as I was with “The Great Believers” where I felt a great emotional pull. This is a very different book and is a highly contemporary and relevant one.
I Have Some Questions For You is published in the UK by Fleet, an imprint of Little Brown Viking on 23rd February 2023. Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Bodie is a successful podcaster who returns to her former boarding school to teach a class. As one of the students asks to make a podcast about Bodie‘s former room-mate, who was murdered during Bodie‘s time there, Bodie has to ask herself if that is what she hoped for all along.

I really liked this but I‘m giving it 4 stars rather than 5. Parts of it seemed really slow; in fact I had to check how long the physical book was as it felt VERY slow in places. Bodie had an interesting back story that didn‘t seem to fully connect with the rest of the story.

I did like; the references to many other murdered / abused women. Bodie had her own ‘me-too‘ issues with something her ex-husband did, that fitted in nicely to the story. Always love an academic setting. I usually prefer my endings to be nicely wrapped up in a bow and this one wasn‘t, but it worked.

My rating: 7.5/10

- can't beat a classic boarding school murder story
- this is the first time I've seen podcasting appear as part of a narrative, & it's done really naturally and unobtrusively
- there's a great motif throughout that places the events of the story in the context of real-life events and crimes
- it's a beautiful and tender look back at adolescence, but I wanted a little more emotional exploration in places.

Favourite line: We hugged like old friends, because we were. You don't have to have been friends with someone to be old friends with them later.

Really enjoyed reading this book. It was unique and gripping and the characters are portrayed well. Really interesting reading about bodie and her past experience studying at granby with then going back to teach.

I have some questions for you by Rebecca Makkai

From the very start I was totally gripped by this story. Bodie is a successful film professor and podcaster and returns to Granby, where she attended school for 4 years in the 90s. During her time there, one of her classmates Thalia was murdered. During her time as a guest teacher Bodie ends up thinking about the details of the murder and the conviction of Omar.

I'm not sure what made me love this story this much as I mystery are not always my cup of tea. , maybe that I loved boarding school stories like Malory Towers and St Clares when I was young (Though Enid Blyton would have been scandalised by the Granby students and what they got up to!)

The way the narrator was reflecting back on her own relationships when she attended the school and her experience returning as a guest teacher really added depth to the novel for me rather than it simply being a mystery around what happened to Thalia.

I have the Great Believers out the library and after reading this I can't wait to read it!

I highly recommend this book and am sure we will see it on prize lists.

Thank you to the author, publishers and netgalley UK for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I have some questions for you will be released on 23rd February 2023.

Bodie Kane recalls her time at Granby School with little fondness, her years there marred by the death of her roommate and the years she spent feeling an outcast. Now an adult, and a successful podcaster, Bodie is asked back to the school to teach a class. It’s not long before her focus returns to the case that so many know of.
Thalia Keith was loved by many. There were rumours about her behaviour, but when she was found dead in the school pool the investigation soon found the school’s athletic trainer guilty. Few questioned the conviction at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight some - Bodie included - wonder whether they knew more than they realised and whether the wrong person was convicted.
We follow Bodie as she settles into her life at the school. One of her students asks to investigate Thalia’s case. Without giving key details away, Bodie oversees their work while also finding a chance to try and pass on the information that she feels should have been given at the time.
The precise details of the crime are never fully outlined. While frustrating, it highlights just how easy it is for femicide to take place and the way we as a society view those impacted by it. I found myself increasingly irritated by the way crimes against women were referred to here. Yes, there’s lots. Yes, there’s people in positions of power who abuse that power and get away with it. Yes, many in society look to blame the victim. It’s all awful, makes my blood boil, and yet I couldn’t help but feel I wanted something more from the book.
My expectations were high going in, perhaps too high. It’s an engaging read, and yet it doesn’t really offer anything different.
Thanks to NetGalley for giving me the chance to read and review this before publication.

Rebecca Makkai's 'I Have Some Questions for You' is a brilliant, meaty literary thriller which works both as a gripping mystery and a profound meditation on the many forms that abuse of power can take in today's world.

When Bodie Kane, a podcaster and film historian, returns to her New Hampshire boarding school as a guest professor, she and her students find herself exploring unanswered questions about the murder of her roommate, Thalia, over two decades previously. Amidst growing online speculation that the school athletics coach, Omar Evans, was wrongly convicted of Thalia's murder, Bodie re-evaluates what she and others knew about Thalia's death, and what remained unspoken at the time.

This is a book which works on multiple levels. First and foremost, Makkai offers a well-constructed whodunnit which maintains our interest in the question of who killed Thalia Keith through a mixture of Bodie's own memories, evidence from the original trial, testimonies from her classmates and teachers and new clues which she and her students uncover. There are a number of unexpected twists and I found this genuinely unputdownable throughout.

This is also a powerful coming-of-age story in which Bodie looks back on her troubled past and her sense of being an outsider throughout her time at school. By having Bodie narrate this so much later, Makkai is able to explore the subjectivity of memory and the stories that Bodie and her peers tell about themselves and each other to make sense of their lives. Makkai is really good on the casual cruelties of which teenagers can be capable and the lasting effects of these, and although the novel deals in some stock tropes, these are never clichéd: the characterisation feels plausible throughout.

However, what really elevates this novel is the way that Makkai frames her central mystery within wider national conversations about power and privilege, both in terms of gender and race. One of the novel's most striking stylistic features is the frequent listing of news stories detailing different abuse scandals, all identified with the words "the one where" ("Let's say it was the one where the young actresses said yes to a pool party and didn't know. Or, no, let's say it was the one where the rugby team covered up the girl's death and the school covered for the rugby team.") This highlights both the ubiquity and interchangeability of these stories which are, in a sense, all the same story.

But while the novel simmers with a quiet fury at the inescapability of such violence, Makkai resists easy answers. As in other post-#MeToo novels such as 'Fleishman Is in Trouble', 'My Dark Vanessa' and 'Vladimir', Makkai seeks to complicate her treatment of these issues by having Bodie consider the extent to which she may have been complicit, through her both her words and her silence, particularly when her husband becomes embroiled in a social media storm of his own.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC of this superb novel to review!

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai
Publication day: 23 February
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⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4 stars
Thank you to NetGalley and Little Brown Books for providing me with an e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
~~~~~
A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is invited back to her former boarding school, Granby, to teach a two-week course. But as she returns on campus, Bodie finds she cannot stop herself revisiting the circumstances that led to her former roommate's murder in 1995. She begins to wonder if she wasn't as much of an outsider at Granby as she'd thought - if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.
~~~~~
Overall, I thought this book felt a little "light" in terms of the murder mystery and its resolution, and a bit predictable.

However, Rebecca Makkai's writing is really compelling and really kept me engaged throughout the story. The beginning was slightly confusing as Bodie relates her time returning to Granby directly to another character and at first, it's really not clear who she's speaking to.
Bodie is not a very likeable character, she has quite a self-centered and hypocritical streak to herself and through Bodie's very flawed - and sometimes obsessive - perspective, Makkai is making some interesting points on prejudice, racism, classism, unconscious bias and profiling.

There is also a very effective use of repetition throughout the story where Makkai highlights the numerous occurrences of violence and harassment against women: "It was the one where the harasser ended up on the Supreme Court. It was the one where the rapist ended up on the Supreme Court. It was the one where the woman, shaking, testified all day on live TV and nothing happened. The one where the judge said the swimmer was so promising [...] You know the one."
I thought this was very powerful and impactful, because yeah... We know the one.

The problem with stories set in highschool, is that the viewpoint through a teenagers eyes often comes across as superficial. I found the first ~100 pages of this quite tedious in that sense, the main character returns to a her old boarding school now as a teacher and we are painstakingly introduced to the supporting characters throuhh memories of her old classmates- 'this is so-and-so who has blonde hair and kissed so-and-so' etc. I understand this is how young adults of that age percieve the world around them (big generalisation), but I just found it took long to set the scene before this story got going.

We are then drip-fed possible information about a crime that happened, much akin to a Netflix true crime documentary which could have been one episode but was in fact ten. Through different characters memories of the event, and small clues discovered by the current students of the school, the reader is lead through different suspects and scenarios. This takes another ~300 pages.

The man incarcerated for this crime, who claims to be innocent, gets some hope when in the last ~50 pages of the book new witnesses are called in front of judge who suggest he is in fact innocent.

Despite the fact I think this book should've been about half the size, I did enjoy a lot of the themes and characters. It's another story highlighting the racism and injustice crippling the US justice system, and the difficulties in battling prejudice. A scary reminder that innocence does not exclude you from being charged and ultimately serving time in prison.

i have one word for this book… wow. right so i’m basically going to grab a physical copy as soon as i can and recommend it to my base on bookstagram. this book is honestly so good and i loved it so much. i’m gonna press that ‘renew’ button on here a few times because i know i’m going to do a re-read of this very soon!

this book was filled with so many twists and turns omg, i was always guessing everything and my emotions were played with SO much! i’d never read any of makkai’s previous work but from what i had heard was that their work was incredible and if it’s anything like this book, then i will be grabbing a lot more of their work.

i adore makkai’s writing style m it was so easy to follow and so fast paced too! i was completely drawn in from the start and was attached to the characters. this story is honestly so captivating and i cannot wait to share this with my 19k followers on bookstagram!

I have not read anything by this author before and, I must admit, I did wonder whether to read this or not – true crime podcaster as the lead character seems a little overdone. That said, this novel shows that, although there are only so many plots, it is the writing that counts and the author has created an extremely well-written book, full of interesting characters, with lots of side stories and a really engaging plot.

So, the main character is Bodie Kane, a film professor and podcaster, who came from a poor background but who attended a boarding school named Granby. Whilst there, in 1995, her roommate, Thalia, was found dead in the schools pool. Before long, it became apparent that the death was no accident and the athletics coach, Omar Evans, was found guilty of murder. Fast forward to the present and Bodie is invited back to Granby to run a course on podcasting and, when one of the kids she is teaching suggests doing a podcast on the Thalia Keith murder, she doesn’t exactly dissuade her.

This novel has so much to offer in terms of plots and discussion points. From the ‘me too,’ movement, through bullying, belonging, privilege, the sheer difficulty of being young and negotiating all of those unwritten rules, marriage, relationships and parenting. The author cleverly inserts many occasions when people ask Bodie who is watching her kids, while male characters are never questioned, for example, which just rang so true. Along the way, there is also the suggestion that the wrong person is in prison – still in prison – for Thalia’s murder, when Bodie personally believes someone else may have been responsible.

A great read, loved it and will certainly be looking for more work by this author. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

Bodie Kane had been living a blissfully uncomplicated life until she was invited back to teach at The Granby School. Though it brings up painful memories of her family tragedy and the 1995 murder of classmate Thalia Keith, Bodie can't help but be drawn into revisiting the case - especially when suspicions arise that maybe Coach Omar Evans wasn't guilty after all... Could Bodie have known something in '95 that could solve this unsolved mystery? Time will tell!

With so many book reviews out there, it can be hard to know which ones to trust. That’s why I decided to give an honest review of Rebecca Makkai’s “I Have Questions For You.” I want to tell you what I liked and didn’t like about the book so you can make an informed decision about whether or not it’s something you want to read.

Some of the plot points and characters felt rushed or underdeveloped. There are so many people mentioned throughout the book that it was difficult at times to keep track of who was who and what was going on. Additionally, the style of writing made it difficult for me to connect with Bodie, the protagonist. I didn’t have any strong feelings either way for her, I didn’t like or dislike her, she was just there.

The issues she has with her ex-husband and current lover were a lot for me to take in and process. While Bodie is examining the murder of her roommate at school she realised that someone has mentioned she was essentially too ugly to have to worry about the abusers. She doesn’t really investigate this or consider that there must have been abuser for this to be mentioned. This meant some of the most interesting aspects were ignored by Makkai; Bodie spends so much time focussing on her issues at school, the mockery and bullying, which, while awful for her isn’t really comparable to an abuser but then she dismisses the accusations against her husband. I wanted to explore this hypocrisy more but that didn’t happen. Other parts which weren’t relevant seemed to be over-explored making this even more frustrating.

I am sure that Bodie was deliberately flawed but I found her frustrating at times, she seems to have taken the story of the girl's dreadful murder to try and focus it around her as the central character instead. There are times when she explores how girls are conditioned to accept exploitation but it doesn’t really gain any momentum, instead, it feels a little like the message is more just one of misogyny existing rather than what can be done to challenge it. I also really disliked the listing of people that horrible things had happened to like a shopping list of nameless, faceless people rather than any information on what happened or the impact of such actions etc.

I felt like there was a message to be told from Makkai here which just didn’t come through for me. I have questions for you was too long and drawn out for me which made it a difficult and as mentioned before, confusing read. I wanted to rush to get through to the end in case it was brilliant but it felt tedious.

All things considered, Rebecca Makkai’s “I Have Questions For You” is not a bad read but unfortunately suffers from having too many characters and too much plot meaning it sacrifices character development in order for everything else to fit together. If you're okay with this kind of storytelling, then you should definitely pick up this book! However, if strong character development is important for your enjoyment, then it might not be worth your time just yet.

Bodie is a successful podcaster, having made a career delving back into the sad and scandalous lives of Golden Age Hollywood actresses. A visit to her old boarding school pulls her into a re-investigation of a student’s murder.

So much more than a murder mystery, this pulls at threads about the morality of true crime reporting, the inherent prejudices in the justice system, the complex grey areas around consent, class and social mobility. I found it both compelling and deeply thoughtful.