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Book Summary and Reviews of I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

I Have Some Questions for You

A Novel

by Rebecca Makkai

  • Critics' Consensus (5):
  • Readers' Rating (2):
  • Published:
  • Feb 2023, 448 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

The riveting new novel from the author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Great Believers.

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia's death and the conviction of the school's athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.

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? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie 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.

In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman's reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Clever and deeply thoughtful ... a deliciously complex reckoning ... [I Have Some Questions for You] is sure to be a hit." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A beguiling campus novel ... Chilled as the deep New England winters during which it takes place and twisty with the slowly found and then suddenly illuminated branches of memory, Makkai's rich, winding story dazzles from cover to cover." - Booklist (starred review)

"[Makkai adds] intriguing layers of complication ... Well plotted, well written, and well designed." - Kirkus Reviews

"Every year, I look for the novels that truly respect their victims, and think carefully about the tropes of true crime; for 2023, [I Have Some Questions for You] is that novel." - Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

"[An] addictive page-turner." - O Quarterly

"The Secret History meets Serial…[in this] modern campus novel, in which a woman goes back to her old boarding school to teach a class on podcasting and winds up reliving—and relitigating—her own youth and the murder of a classmate." - LitHub

"This psychological thriller hits all the high notes, complete with at least a few revelations you won't see coming." - Good Housekeeping

This information about I Have Some Questions for You was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Rebecca Makkai Author Biography

Rebecca Makkai's last novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, the Clark Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize; and it was one of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of 2018. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime—four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada University and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. Her novel I Have Some Questions for You was published in 2023.

Link to Rebecca Makkai's Website

Name Pronunciation
Rebecca Makkai: mac-EYE

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