Bodie Kane is a film professor and podcaster. She’s been invited to teach a short between-semesters enrichment class at her old prep school in New Hampshire. The school was predominantly for the upper class wealthy kids along with a few promising scholarship recipients.

Bodie was one of the scholarship recipients that never quite fit in. Her first semester she was randomly given beautiful, wealthy, popular Thalia Keith as a roommate. The two were never friends, never enemies and drifted apart when they were no longer roommates.

Nevertheless, Bodie was as shocked as everyone else when Thalia’s body was found in the swimming pool. It was made to look like an accident but was in fact murder. The swim coach, one of the few black men on campus, was charged, convicted and at this point served more than twenty years in prison.

For her class Bodie suggests students pick topics from the school’s history for their podcasts. She lists Thalia’s murder as a possible subject; one boy chooses it and eventually the whole class including Bodie herself are sucked in.

Was the right man imprisoned? This case has continued to be of great interest on the internet and various internet groups are working to get the coach freed and still examining and re-examining evidence.

This is not a typical murder mystery. I loved the fact that Makkai reminds us that, at bottom, all murders are alike; and that so many of them hit the news cycles and true crime newscasts that the details are blurred. It’s also a look into the casual racism that can convict a black man; and how even DNA evidence can point in odd direction. ( )

3.5 ( )

This deliberately paced, somewhat 2nd person narrative, examines a 25 year old murder of a 17 year old woman and a private and somewhat isolated New Hampshire high school. Originally satisfied with the conviction of an athletics teacher for the crime, when podcaster Bodie takes a mini-mester position teaching podcasting and film history her memories and others' efforts to exonerate the man convicted come together to have her re-evaluate more likely scenarios than the obviously flawed one pursued by the state police.
This is an attack of previously only occasionally challenged culture that accepted public groping and demeaning of woman as normal and stigmatized women who expressed anger over it and in fact rarely credited women with real grievance to the extent of not taking death threats or even deaths seriously - unless they could find the right sort of perp, not one of us. ( )

I Have Some Questions For You had an interesting premise, and I was intrigued by the fact that Bodie was a podcaster, but unfortunately, the story did not live up to its premise. The story was extremely slow, and the mystery was thin, to say the least. I also think it was way too long, filled with secondary plot lines that added very little to the overall story.

First of all, Bodie was super annoying. I don't have to like the main character, but I need to understand the motives and feel some type of connection to what they are going through. All Bodie did was try and bring everything back to her and what she went through, whether it was at school at in life. Personally, I found her whiny, self-centered, and extremely selfish. The author spends so much time trying to convince the reader that Bodie wasn't the one who developed the idea for the podcast and the murders, making sure you understood it was solely her student's idea that is grew superfluous to the story. Really?

There were a lot of characters to keep track of, something that is normally not a problem, but when there is little character development to distinguish all the characters, this becomes an issue. After a while, I couldn't tell them apart, they were all so one-dimensional. All it did was lesson the overall impact I think the author was going for.

The story itself could have been very interesting, but what I find sometimes is this tendency to what to discuss multiple issues within the same story, something that overwhelms both the story and the characters. The themes themselves were quite good, things such as SA, grooming, predatory behaviour, racism, sexism, and so on. The problem is there were way too many issues and I think the author was overwhelmed sometimes with which issue should be highlighted so both the characters and the story suffered as a result. If a couple of these issues had been chose and allowed to develop, I think we would have had a much better story overall, something that would have allowed for better character development as well.

Verdict
I Have Some Questions For You is classified as a literary ...something, but I can't quite figure out what it was. Mystery? I found the writing to be simplistic, and the character development was non-existent, with a main character that was poorly written and frankly, annoying. I think it was trying to be deep and contemplative, but it missed the mark completely. Upon completion of this novel, I am still trying to figure out its purpose and what I was supposed to take away from it. Unfortunately, this book did not live up to its expectations for me. ( )

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai is a fantastic mystery that includes commentary on social media, the me-too movement, and injustice. ( )