Name: I Have Some Questions for You
Rating: 5 (5 reviews)
Author: Rebecca Makkai

About this book

Summary
Book Club Questions

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.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

Several characters in I Have Some Questions for You reflect on their adolescent selves—versions of themselves that feel at once remote and familiar. Do you think it's possible, with enough distance, for any of us—including Bodie—to see our high school selves clearly? How do you think cultural norms have shifted since you were a teenager? How does Bodie's sense of herself, then and now, affect her understanding of Thalia's case?
True crime media has become exceedingly popular in recent years. Why do you think fans of the genre find it so fascinating and even therapeutic to dissect such gruesome events? What considerations factor into being an ethical creator or consumer of true crime media?
Bodie's ...

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.

Reader Reviews

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Cathryn Conroy

A Complex Literary Mystery: A True-Crime Whodunit with a Brain That's Also a Page-Turner
This is a literary mystery—a true-crime whodunit with a brain—that is a gripping, masterful novel written by the award-winning author Rebecca Makkai.

It's 2018. Bodie Kane is 40, a film scholar, adjunct film professor at UCLA, and the co-host of a successful podcast on women in film titled Starlet Fever, when the Granby School, her New Hampshire prep school, invites her to teach two two-week classes in January—one on podcasting and the other on film studies. Leaving her two children with her soon-to-be ex-husband, she flies east from Los Angeles and returns to a place where she was once unhappy, conflicted, and an outcast.

Being on campus on these dark winter days dredges up the horrific memories of the murder on March 3, 1995 of student Thalia Keith in their senior year. Hours after the school production of "Camelot," Thalia was found floating in the pool with severe head injuries inconsistent with drowning. Bodie roomed with Thalia as a junior but was never close friends with the popular girl. Thalia's murder was blamed on 25-year-old Black athletic trainer Omar Evans, but Bodie is convinced the wrong man is in prison, serving a life term for something he didn't do. When one of the students in her seminar decides to do a podcast on Thalia's murder, Bodie is intrigued and assists in the background. What they discover is chilling, but too much of it is circumstantial. Still, is the real murderer walking free all these years later?

The form of the book is clever. It is written in the first person from Bodie's point of view but penned as a kind of letter to the man Bodie suspects to be the real murderer, whom she addresses throughout the novel as "you." That person is Denny Bloch, a favorite music teacher and the drama coach, whom Bodie believes was having an affair with Thalia—an affair that went drastically wrong and had the power to upend Bloch's marriage and career. Is Bodie right? What kind of nefarious coverup is still going on years later? Who else is being protected? And what does Bodie know about that tragic spring that she may not have told anyone else?

In addition to being a complex murder mystery that simmers with tension, this is a coming-of-age story as Bodie and her Granby classmates as adults recall those formative years. This is a story about memory—the good ones that make us happy and the dark ones we have relegated to a deep part of the past. It's also a story about the abuse so many women suffer at the hands of men who supposedly love them, making this a inspired entry in the literary #MeToo genre.

This novel excels on so many levels: an extraordinary multilayered plot, believable characters that pop off the page, and masterful writing.

Best of all, it's a page-turner, as any good murder mystery should be.

BookwormBecky

Bookworm Becky - clever whodunit
Whodunit, rumors, reckoning…

Bodie was a student in a NH boarding school in the 1990s. In 1995, her roomie Thalia was murdered. Omar, the athletic trainer at the school , was arrested for the murder and has been in prison for 23 years.

23 years later, Bodie has been invited back to teach two two-week classes about film and podcasts. Now everyone is questioning the murder case and the arrest of Omar. One of the podcast students decides to examine the case for her class project.

Many questions and theories are discussed, including suspicions concerning a popular teacher.

Many possible suspects! Did Omar do it or not?

How memories change over the years!

What will you find when you re-examine your youth?

Slow start - lots of characters - stick with it!

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Author Information

Biography
Books by this Author

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