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Rebecca Makkai

I Have Some Questions for You: A Novel Hardcover – February 21, 2023

by Rebecca Makkai (Author)

3.9 6,798 ratings

Editors' pick Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“A twisty, immersive whodunit perfect for fans of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.” —People

"Spellbinding." —The New York Times Book Review

"[An] irresistible literary page-turner." —The Boston Globe

Named a Best Book of 2023 by USA Today, Esquire, Real Simple, PopSugar, and CrimeReads

The riveting new novel — "part true-crime page-turner, part campus coming-of-age" (San Francisco Chronicle) — 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.

Print length

448 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Viking
Publication date

February 21, 2023
Dimensions

6.22 x 1.41 x 9.31 inches
ISBN-10

0593490142
ISBN-13

978-0593490143
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Popular Highlights in this book

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The need to keep busy is both a symptom of high-functioning anxiety and the key to my success.
Highlighted by 1,100 Kindle readers
What bothers me now is those boys internalizing girls as audience, there only to act as mirrors, to make their accomplishments realer.)
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From the Publisher

Unputdownable and unforgettable. Makkai has written the book of a season — Andrew Sean

Named a most anticipated book of 2023 by NPR, TIME, Lit Hub, SALON, The Washington Post, EW, etc

A twisty, immersive whodunit perfect for fans of Donna Tartt's THE SECRET HISTORY — People

A spellbinding work — New York Times Book Review

A great accomplishment... An irresistible literary page-turner... — The Boston Globe

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Bodie Caine, a successful podcaster, returns to the boarding school she attended to teach a mini-semester class on podcasting. This provides her with the opportunity to encourage her students to investigate the murder of her classmate Thalia Keith. A Black staff member, Omar Evans, was convicted of her murder, but Bodie believes it was a wrongful conviction, and the killer is a teacher who may have been grooming Thalia. Her actions set into motion an investigation that raises more questions and reveals some truths. The narrative moves back and forth between Bodie when she was a student and current events, starkly illustrating the casual sexual harassment and assault of female students by their male classmates that was brushed off as "boys will be boys." Omar is granted a hearing, the result of new information uncovered by Bodie's student podcasters, bringing former classmates back to town. These adults now find themselves facing the dark parts of their teen past. Throughout the narrative are brief montages of women killed by violence: "Wasn't it the one where she was stabbed?—no. The one where she got in a cab with—different girl. The one where she went to the frat party, the one where he used a stick, the one where he used a hammer…." These run like a lament. Bodie is introspective and manipulative and writes her story directed at the teacher Thalia was involved with. The ending is realistic and not what Bodie hoped for, but she does find some closure. VERDICT A page-turning examination of power, sex, and murder as characters revisit their pasts with a new perspective.—Tamara Saarinen

Review

“Thought-provoking, deeply unsettling and undeniably riveting...A fully immersive, addictive whodunit.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A spellbinding work...[Makkai’s] prose is lean yet lush, with short, incantatory chapters and sentences as taut as piano wire.” —New York Times Book Review

“Enthralling...Rich in incident and alive with expressive imagery.” —Wall Street Journal

“A great accomplishment. [I Have Some Questions for You]is at once a campus novel, a piercing reflection on the appeal and ethics of the true crime genre, and a story of Me Too reckoning. It is also the most irresistible literary page-turner I have read in years...Exquisitely suspenseful and enormously entertaining.” —Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe

“[I Have Some Questions for You] embraces the intricate plotting and emotional heft that made [Makkai’s] previous novel,The Great Believers, a Pulitzer finalist...Makkai sharply conveys the insidiousness of misogyny...[and] deftly explores how remembrance can melt into reverie...Her patient, evocative character work prevents Omar and Thalia from becoming types...The result is not a book that leers at a discrete and unfathomable act of violence but one that investigates...‘two stolen lives.’” —The New Yorker

“Vastly entertaining . . . both a thickly-plotted, character-driven mystery and a stylishly self-aware novel of ideas . . . in a twist worthy of Poe, Makkai suggests that the truth alone may not set you free or lay spirits to rest.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR's “Fresh Air”

“Bewitching.” —Vanity Fair

“[An] addictive page-turner.” —O Quarterly

“As we race through [I Have Some Questions for You], we’re pulled into playing much the same role as Bodie does: trying to piece together the various stories, eagerly awaiting a verdict . . . [Makkai] leaves us to fill in the gaps, to conjure the lurid details from scraps and rumors—trapped in a quest, her agile book reminds us, that should always leave us second-guessing.” —The Atlantic

“A critique of the true-crime obsession and its inherent voyeurism, refracted through everyone’s new favorite storytelling device, the podcast . . . This sense of collective responsibility is the kind of nuance that doesn’t often emerge from the true-crime content mills. In the world of I Have Some Questions for You, however, there’s an insistent hope that the truth still matters, even when it’s complicated—that the right thing might happen despite the near-impossibility of justice in our society.” —The Nation

“Makkai’s powerhouse novel has all the draw and momentum of the wildly entertaining mystery that it is, but lurking behind the plot is a series of escalating existential questions about trauma, memory, and the ever-shifting terrain of the past . . . Makkai brings to the story a vertiginous sensation of falling again and again into new doubts and desires, one that brings to mind Hitchcock at his best and forces the reader constantly to double back and wonder where the story has taken them, really. I Have Some Questions For You is a smart, sophisticated mystery, crafted with verve.” —CrimeReads, “The Best Crime Novels of the Year (So Far)”

“A sleekly plotted literary murder mystery…Makkai has written a complicated whodunit fueled by feminist rage as Bodie relentlessly interrogates her past and recalls the countless murders of girls and women whose stories have been all but lost in our collective memory.” —Associated Press

“I Have Some Questions for You asks us to examine many things: high school, the ’90s, privilege, justice, sexual harassment, what we owe the dead. Like the true crime podcasts it’s modeled on, it’s addictive, well told and a little bit unsettling.” —Los Angeles Times

“Gripping...a damn good story...[Makkai turns] abstractions of personal, social, and cultural politics into a practical, deeply felt and occasionally even thrilling reality.” —Star-Tribune

“Makkai combines skilled storytelling with abundant human insight. [I Have Some Questions for You] is so well-plotted and thought-provoking that readers may struggle with conflicting impulses to keep turning the pages to find out what happens next or to stop and think about what it all means.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“[Makkai’s] writing is witty and knife-sharp.” —Condé Nast Traveler

“Hits all the high notes, complete with at least a few revelations you won't see coming.” —Good Housekeeping

“[I Have Some Questions for You] calls into question our relationships to memory and power while also challenging readers to reconsider how we think about race, sex, and class.” —Time

“Makkai has crafted an un-put-downable, captivating boarding school mystery novel with podcasting, teaching, race, divorce, parenting, professional drive, and teen dynamics as undercurrents . . . The writing in this book is absolutely A+ sensational. Pure perfection.” —Zibby Owens, GoodMorningAmerica.com

“Makkai’s sleek, beautifully crafted prose and sharp sense of character make I Have Some Questions for You a pleasure to read even as its twisting plot propels us into darkness.” —Tampa Bay Times

“[A] deft murder-mystery . . . Makkai’s poignant mediation on memory and loss is distinguished by clear prose [and] memorable (and flawed) characters.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Perfectly illustrate[s] the present mood.” —Dallas Voice

“The Secret History meets Serial…[in this] modern campus novel.” —Lit Hub

“Makkai’s triumph of a novel mixes clever storytelling with an exploration of consent, control and memory . . . satisfying and cleverly multi-layered . . . combines the smarts of literary fiction with the thrills of a whodunnit, topped with all the divertissements of the best boarding school-set dramas.” —Financial Times (London)

“[A] skillfully crafted academic mystery.” —PopSugar

“Dark academia meets state of America in this brilliant, original novel.” —Daily Mail

“An enthralling mystery, an interrogation of the past, an entrancing campus novel, I Have Some Questions for You is a propulsive page-turner.” —B&N Reads

“Part boarding school drama, part forensic whodunnit, I Have Some Questions for You is a true literary mystery—haunting and hard to put down.” —Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House

“I’ve been waiting years for a book like this! You will laugh, think, think again, cry and stay up all night finishing it. Unputdownable and unforgettable. Makkai has written the book of the season.” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less and Less Is Lost

“Both a deeply satisfying crime story and a thoughtful, even provocative, novel of ideas, I Have Some Questions for You narrates one woman’s interrogation of her own past while in turn posing difficult questions directly to its reader: about sex, power, privilege, and the ambient violence of contemporary American life. What a feat.” —Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind

“Some books are so universal that they feel bizarrely specific: I read I Have Some Questions for You as if it was written just for me, but I can't imagine who wouldn't love it. Timely, provocative, nuanced, generous—Rebecca Makkai astonishes once again with the perfect combination of brains and heart.” —Laura Lippmann, author of Dream Girl

“Rebecca Makkai’s extraordinary storytelling gifts are on full display in I Have Some Questions for You, a tense, sharply drawn, and impeccably plotted literary mystery andan urgent, propulsive story of the collision of gender, race, and class in a New England boarding school. I loved walking alongside narrator Bodie Kane—angry, obsessive, struggling with her own traumatic memories—in her imperfect attempts to reckon with a past she longs to leave behind.” —Elizabeth Wetmore, New York Times bestselling author of Valentine

“One of the things I love most about Rebecca Makkai’s writing is her absolutely engaging voice; reading her books feels like hearing a well-told story by a longtime friend. This book—through the voice of its beautifully complex narrator, Bodie Kane—brings readers along on a journey they won't forget.” —Liz Moore, New York Times bestselling author of Long Bright River

“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 thought-provoking and delicious tale of life and death and justice that very well may have gone sideways.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Engrossing . . . a well-plotted indictment of systemic racism and misogyny craftily disguised as a thriller and beautifully constructed to make its points.” —BookPage (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)

“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

“Makkai's novel takes on some of the defining issues of its time [...] without battering readers with them. Instead, Makkai carefully winds her themes around her story's scaffolding, which strengthens her masterly plot even more.” —Shelf Awareness

“[Makkai adds] intriguing layers of complication . . . Well plotted, well written, and well designed.” —Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Rebecca Makkai is the author of the novels I Have Some Questions for You, The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, and the story collection Music for Wartime. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Great Believers received an American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors, and was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2018 by The New York Times. A 2022 Guggenheim fellow, Makkai is on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Northwestern University, and is the artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago. She lives on the campus of the midwestern boarding school where her husband teaches, and in Vermont.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1.

I first watched the video in 2016. I was in bed on my laptop, with headphones, worried Jerome would wake up and I'd have to explain. Down the hall, my children were sleeping. I could have gone and checked on them, felt their warm cheeks and hot breath. I could have smelled my daughter's hair-and maybe the scent of damp lavender and a toddler's scalp would have been enough to send me to sleep.

But a friend I hadn't seen in twenty years had just sent me the link, and so I clicked.

Lerner and Loewe's Camelot. I was both stage manager and tech director. One fixed camera, too close to the orchestra, too far from the unmiked adolescent singers, 1995 VHS quality, some member of the AV club behind the lens. And my God, we knew we weren't great, but we weren't even as good as we thought we were. Whoever uploaded it two decades later, whoever added the notes below with the exact time markers for when Thalia Keith shows up, had also posted the list of cast and crew. Beth Docherty as a petite Guinevere, Sakina John glowing as Morgan le Fay with a crown of gold spikes atop her cornrows, Mike Stiles beautiful and embarrassed as King Arthur. My name is misspelled, but it's there, too.

The curtain call is the last shot where you clearly see Thalia, her dark curls distinguishing her from the washed-out mass. Then most everyone stays onstage to sing "Happy Birthday" to Mrs. Ross, our director, to pull her up from the front row where she sat every night jotting notes. She's so young, something I hadn't registered then.

A few kids exit, return in confusion. Orchestra members hop onstage to sing, Mrs. Ross's husband springs from the audience with flowers, the crew comes on in black shirts and black jeans. I don't appear; I assume I stayed up in the box. It would have been like me to sit it out.

Including the regrouping and singing, the birthday business lasts fifty-two seconds, during which you never see Thalia clearly. In the comments, someone had zoomed in on a bit of green dress at one side of the frame, posted side-by-side photos of that smear of color and the dress Thalia wore-first covered in gauze as Nimue, the enchantress, the Lady of the Lake, and then ungauzed, with a simple headdress, as Lady Anne. But there were several green dresses. My friend Carlotta's was one. There's a chance that, by then, Thalia was gone.

Most of the discussion below the video focused on timing. The show was set to begin at 7:00, but we likely started our mercifully abridged version five minutes late. Maybe more. The tape omitted intermission, and there was speculation on how long the intermission of a high school musical would last. Depending on what you believe about these two variables, the show ended sometime between 8:45 and 9:15. I should have known. Once, there would have been a binder with my meticulous notes. But no one ever asked for it.

The window the medical examiner allowed for Thalia's time of death was 8:00 p.m. to midnight, with the beginning of the slot curtailed by the musical-the reason the show's exact end time had become the subject of infinite fascination online.

I came here from YouTube, one commenter had written in 2015, linking to a separate video. Watch this. It PROVES they bungled the case. The timeline makes no sense.

Someone else wrote: Wrong guy in prison bc of racist cops in schools pocket.

And below that: Welcome to Tinfoil Hat Central! Focus your energies on an ACTUAL UNSOLVED CASE.

Watching the video twenty-one years after the fact, the memory that dislodged from my brain's dark corners was looking up lusty in the library dictionary with my friend Fran, who was in the chorus. To quiet our giggling about "The Lusty Month of May," Mrs. Ross had announced that "lusty simply means vibrant. You're welcome to look it up." But what did Mrs. Ross know about lust? Lust was for the young, not married drama teachers. But ("Holy apeshit," as Fran would have said, might have said), look, according to Webster, lusty indeed meant healthy and strong; full of vigor. One of the examples was a lusty beef stew. We fled the library laughing, Fran singing, "Oh, a lusty stew of beef!"

Where had I kept that memory, all those years?

The first time through the video I skipped around, really only watching the end; I had no desire to listen at length to teenage voices, poorly tuned string instruments. But then I went back-the same night, two a.m., my melatonin tablet failing-and watched all the parts with Thalia. Act I, Scene 2 was her only scene as Nimue. She appeared upstage in a dry ice fog, singing hypnotically behind Merlin. Something bothered me about how she kept glancing away from him as she sang, looking offstage right, as if she needed prompting. She couldn't have; all she needed to do was sing her one repetitive song.

I climbed carefully over Jerome to get his iPad from his nightstand and brought the video up there, this time zooming in on her face, making it larger if not clearer. It's subtle, but she looks irritated.

And then, as Merlin gives his farewell speech, bidding goodbye to Arthur and Camelot, she looks away again, nearly over her shoulder. She mouths something; it's not my imagination. Her lips start to close and then part, a formation that makes a W sound when I replicate it. She's saying, I'm almost sure, the word what. Maybe just to a stagehand, one of my crew holding up a forgotten prop. But what could have been so important in that moment, right before she exited?

As of 2016, no one in the comments section had fixated on this. They only cared about the timing of the curtain call, whether she was indeed onstage for that last minute. (That and how pretty she was.) Fifty-two seconds, their reasoning went, was enough for Thalia Keith to meet someone waiting backstage, to leave with that person before anyone saw.

At the very end of the tape: Our illustrious orchestra conductor-slash-music director, bow-tied, baton still in hand, begins an announcement no one's listening to: "Thank you all! As you leave-" but the video cedes to a buzz of gray lines. Presumably something about dorm check-in, or taking your trash with you.

Check out Guinevere the last two seconds, one comment reads. Is that a flask? I wanna be friends with Guinevere! I froze the video and yes, it's a silver flask Beth's holding aloft, maybe confident her friends will recognize it but any teachers in the audience will be too distracted to notice. Or maybe Beth was already too buzzed to care.

Another comment asks if anyone can identify the audience members passing the camera as they leave.

Another reads, If you watch the 2005 Dateline special, don't listen to anything they say. SO many errors. Also, it's THA- like the beginning of "thatch" or "thanks" and Lester Holt keeps saying THAY-lia.

Someone replies: I thought it was TAHL-ia.

Nope, nope, nope, the original poster writes. I knew her sister.

Another comment: This whole thing makes me so sad. Followed by three crying emojis and a blue heart.

I dreamed for weeks afterward not about Thalia's head turn, her mouthed question, but about Beth Docherty's flask. In my dreams, I had to find it in order to hide it again. I held my giant binder. My notes were no help.

The theater crowd had begged for that show-had brought it up constantly the year before, whenever Mrs. Ross had dorm duty. There'd been a Broadway revival in '93, and even those of us who hadn't seen it had heard the soundtrack, understood it entailed medieval cleavage, onstage kissing, fabulous solos. For me, it meant castle backgrounds, thrones, trees on casters-nothing tricky, no flesh-eating houseplant, no Ford Deluxe convertible to roll onstage. For the journalists of the future, it would mean endless easy metaphors. Boarding school as kingdom in the woods, Thalia as enchantress, Thalia as princess, Thalia as martyr. What could be more romantic? What's as perfect as a girl stopped dead, midformation? Girl as blank slate. Girl as reflection of your desires, unmarred by her own. Girl as sacrifice to the idea of girl. Girl as a series of childhood photographs, all marked with the aura of girl who will die young, as if even the third grade portrait photographer should have seen it written on her face, that this was a girl who would only ever be a girl.

The bystander, the voyeur, even the perpetrator-they're all off the hook when the girl was born dead.

On the internet and on TV, they love that.

And you, Mr. Bloch: I suppose it's been convenient for you, too.

2.

Against all odds, in January of 2018, I found myself hurtling back toward campus in one of those good old Blue Cabs that had picked me up so many times, so long ago, from the Manchester airport. My driver said he'd been making runs to Granby all day.

"They all went on vacation somewhere," he said.

I said, "They were home for holiday break."

He snorted, as if I'd confirmed his rotten suspicions.

He asked if I taught at Granby. I was startled, for a moment, that he hadn't taken me for a student. But here was my reflection in his rearview: a put-together adult with lines around her eyes. I said no, not really, I was just visiting to teach a two-week course. I didn't explain that I'd gone to Granby, that I knew the route we were traveling like an old song. It felt like too much information to lay on him in casual conversation. I didn't explain the concept of mini-mester, either, because it would sound twee, the exact kind of thing he'd imagine these spoiled kids getting up to.

It was Fran's idea to bring me back. Fran herself had barely left; after a few years away for college, grad school, time abroad, she returned to teach history at Granby. Her wife works in Admissions, and they live on campus with their sons.

My driver's name was Lee, and he told me he'd "been driving these Granby kids since their granddaddies went there." He explained that Granby was the kind of school you could only get into through family connections. I wanted to tell him this was dead wrong, but my window for correcting his assumption that I was an outsider had long passed. He told me that "these kids get up to trouble you wouldn't believe" and asked if I'd read the article "a few years back" in Rolling Stone. That article ("Live Free or Die: Drink, Drugs, and Drowning at an Elite New Hampshire Boarding School") came out in 1996, and yes, we'd all read it. We emailed each other about it from our college dorms, livid over its errors and assumptions-much as we would all text each other nine years later when Dateline dragged everything up again.

Lee said, "They don't supervise those kids a bit. Only thing I'm happy about, they have a rule against Uber."

I said, "That's funny, I've heard the opposite. About the supervision."

"Yeah, well, they're lying. They want you to come teach, they'll say whatever."

I'd only been back to Granby three times in the nearly twenty-three years since graduation. There was one early reunion when I lived in New York; I stayed an hour. I returned for Fran and Anne's wedding in Old Chapel in 2008. In July of 2013, I was in Vermont for a few days and came to see Fran, to meet her first baby. That was it. I'd avoided our tenth and fifteenth and twentieth, ignored the LA alumni meetups. It wasn't till that Camelot video surfaced and Fran looped me in on a subsequent group text, which devolved into theater memories, that I grew genuinely nostalgic for the place. I thought I'd wait for 2020, a reunion my classmates would show for-our twenty-fifth as well as the school's bicentennial. But then, this invitation.

It was convenient, too, that Yahav, the man I'd been having a dragged-out, desperate long-distance affair with, was just two hours away, teaching for the year at BU Law. Yahav had an Israeli accent and was tall and brilliant and neurotic. Our relationship wasn't such that I could simply fly out to see him. But I could find myself in the neighborhood.

Plus I wanted to see if I could do it-if, despite my nerves, my almost adolescent panic, I was ready to measure myself against the girl who'd slouched her way through Granby. In LA I knew in theory that I was accomplished-a sometime college professor with a lauded podcast, a woman who could make a meal from farmers' market ingredients and get her kids to school reasonably dressed-but I didn't particularly feel, on a daily basis, the distance I'd come. At Granby, I knew it would hit me hard.

So there was the money, and the guy, and my ego, and-below it all, a note too low to hear-there was Thalia, there was the way that ever since I'd watched that video, I'd felt just slightly misaligned.

In any case: They asked, I said yes, and here I was, buckled into the backseat letting Lee drive me to campus at ten miles over the speed limit.

He said, "What are you gonna teach them, some Shakespeare?"

I explained that I was teaching two classes: one on podcasting, another on film studies.

"Film studies!" he said. "They watching movies, or making them?"

I felt there was no answer that wouldn't make Lee think worse of both me and the school. I said, "The history of film," which was both correct and incomplete. I added that until recently I'd taught film studies at UCLA, which had the desired effect-I've used this trick before-of getting him straight onto Bruins football. I could make noises of agreement while he monologued. We only had twenty minutes left in the drive, and the odds were low now that he'd either ask me about podcasts or mansplain Quentin Tarantino.

The school had invited me specifically to teach the film class, and I'd volunteered to double up because it would mean twice the money-but also because I've never known how to sit still, and if I was leaving my kids and heading to the woods for two weeks, I didn't want to just sit around. The need to keep busy is both a symptom of high-functioning anxiety and the key to my success.

My podcast at the time was Starlet Fever, a serial history of women in film-the ways the industry chewed them up and spat them out. It was going as well as a podcast reasonably could, occasionally hitting top slots in various download metrics. There was a bit of money in it, and sometimes, thrillingly, a celebrity would mention us in an interview. My cohost, Lance, had been able to quit his landscaping gig, I'd been able to turn down the adjuncting crumbs UCLA threw my way, and we had a couple of literary agents offering representation if we wanted to cowrite a book. We were knee-deep in prep for our upcoming season, centered on Rita Hayworth, but it was research I could do from anywhere.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Viking (February 21, 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593490142
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593490143
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.41 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.22 x 1.41 x 9.31 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,988 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #91 in Mothers & Children Fiction
- #322 in Psychological Thrillers (Books)
- #362 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Rebecca Makkai

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Rebecca Makkai’s new novel, the New York Times bestselling I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU, appeared in February, 2023. Her 2018 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 website is www.rebeccamakkai.com.

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DomeniqueCY

If you need to be reminded...all of the things in a book

Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2023

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First the high level subjects, then the deep dives

First: So all the themes (racism! sexism! covid! me too! prison rights! structural power imbalances!) all at once, in the frame of producing a podcast. The main character being in her forties looking back at her teens...all the terrible things that happened were terrible but now we have better language to describe and classify various abuses, societal or sexual or name your paradigm. The device to explore it all: She is an alum going back to her boarding school to teach a class. Oh and actually all of it is a murder mystery because...framing.

Second: On the deep dives. I struggle back and forth with high school. Some dark academia I find hilarious (Secret History), others I find...contrite (My Dark Vanessa, but it took two or three years to find it contrite). The issue of relationships and the young, whether it is between themselves or with a teacher or a coach or whatever...is that yes there are clearly abuses that happen, but the rest is just gray and trauma...well I don't know...I can't tell whether the author agrees with me, but the protagonist clearly shares the same..."it depends" lens.

But anecdotally, just before reading this book I had a period where I was forced to rehash a lot of high school in about a week. I wouldn't call the whole thing trauma or anything, but some people find high school to be very defining ("they peaked early!") some people don't, and some people don't realize it until it is too late. I am the third.

I didn't realize my own personal frameworks around education and its related systems until I had my own kids. It's been coming up a lot in the last few years, probably because I want to a place that bred competitiveness. I went to a fairly small high school in a surprisingly low-density part of New Jersey with a bunch of people whose socio-economic-class was skewed in a certain direction, if you get my drift. It is not that we did not have people with the have-nots...it's just even them by the overall state of the country were...doing okay... (although god forbid anyone come to school in not-a-beamer or a hand-me-down-saab! I hope everything is okay at home.) So, I kinda get this Granby set.

That wasn't to say there wasn't problems, there were tons of them just like this and every high school.
x
The places are just cesspools of emotional spora. And anyhow I was on a trip to Charleston and I ran into two of my former classmates who I hadn't seen in 15+ years. One interaction was very brief and perfunctory, but the second one, having already been thrown into a period of heightened anxiety about the first, downright made me want to go back on antidepressants.

Because the second one, a girl I was once quite close with walks into a random restaurant with her husband that my husband and I are having lunch in. And of course we picked up right where we left off as our husbands sat bored out of their minds, and she was more open to doing the deep dives of history (like people in this book did). (She also mentioned it took a long time for her to de-program the ultra-over-the top-competitive nature out of her. I sometimes joke with my current friends its like I am running a very important race, and I'm not even competing with the people around me, the starting line was somewhere back in the 00's...)(And because this book SC--remember prom junior year? !?I forgot to tell you at Rue 69 that I ran into your date once on 64th and West end in 2015...I wish there was a joke to this memory but there is not....)

Maybe because I didn't stay friends with my high school friends, because my life moved on, I don't think much about it. But since this trip to Charleston (2 girls from Princeton! In Charleston! On the same weekend! There for different reasons!), I've been going up and down the rabbit hole online. Mostly I discovered my high school has really progressed in terms of addressing mental health and diversity and all the things, but I do wonder if we, the product of it back when, have. According to this book...most of us...probably not.

11 people found this helpful

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June S

un-put-down-able, spellbinding book

Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2023

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I loved this book so, so, so much! For the first time in ages, I stayed up reading into the wee hours because I literally couldn’t put the book down. It also did that magic thing that made me first fall in love with reading as a child—I became Bodie Kane as I read—her thoughts were in my head, my body felt her responses, her trepidation, her amusement, her longing. Rebecca Makkai is a genius at creating that miraculous melding when first person narration weaves its spell over you and you embody the character. The story draws you all the way in like that. I won’t include any spoilers, because I really, really hate knowing about a story before I enter it. I will give one word of caution—when you sit down to read I Have Some Questions for You—and you definitely should read it, make sure your schedule is open enough so that you don’t have to put it down for few hours. Hands down, best book I’ve read all year.

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Lisa Shirley

Entertaining and thought-provoking

Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2023

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A murder mystery that provides multiple perspectives on sexual assault and the #metoo movement, this book places the critical nature of perspective/POV at the center of its (frequent but not constant) 2nd person narrative. The reader gradually realizes he/she is in the position of an off-stage suspect, the “You” in the title. The author does a fantastic job of situating the crime in the context of the countless crimes against women; she also does a good job of representing racism in the criminal justice system. Her depiction of private school education is interesting and, if it’s accurate, extremely troubling.

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William de Rham

I enjoyed it, but I wasn't bowled over.

Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2023

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Readers seeking a story about a decades-old murder that treats many of the issues currently of concern to progressives—including sexism, racism, bullying, adult abuse of minors, police/prosecutorial malfeasance, societal inequalities, and righting past wrongs—need look no further than Rebecca Makkai’s newest novel, “I Have Some Questions For You.”

UCLA Professor Bodie Kane has returned to the Granby School—the New Hampshire boarding school she graduated from in the 1990s—to teach two mini-courses in film history and podcasting.

During her senior year, Bodie’s junior-year roommate, Thalia, was murdered and found floating in the school swimming pool. African-American Omar Evans, then a trainer for the athletics department, is now in prison for the crime. The case drew national attention. Many think he was wrongly convicted. One of Bodie’s podcasting students decides to reexamine the case.

When not with her students, Bodie spends much of her time with old friend and Granby classmate, Fran (now a teacher at the school), reminiscing about their high school years, classmates, and teachers. Meanwhile, back in California, Bodie’s husband is being roasted over “Twittersphere” fires for an alleged sexual impropriety decades ago and finds himself in danger of being “canceled.” Bodie has received many demands to disavow her husband and when she defends him, she also feels the heat. All of this, along with copious amounts of alcohol, brings back some very unpleasant memories for Bodie concerning her pre-high school and high school years—when she was not at her best—and, of course, Thalia’s murder.

This was my first experience with Rebecca Makkai’s work, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. While ”Questions” initially seemed to be a “whodunnit” murder mystery—and that certainly is part of the plot—it’s more an examination of prep school life and culture during the 1990s viewed through the prism of today’s progressivism. While seeming to express approval for many progressive positions, Ms. Makkai also manages to point out some of the excesses and ironies that can attend those positions—so there’s some balance.

For the most part, the novel is well-written. It borrows from, but does not copy, widely reported scandals involving New England boarding schools and/or coaches mistreating young athletes. Genre-wise, it’s much more literary than mystery. There’s a heavy emphasis on the development of Bodie’s character. Makkai slowly reveals the past traumas and conflicts that affect who Bodie is today, and that’s part of what keeps us turning the pages.

However, her other characters range from only somewhat interesting to stereotypical or stock (including “the jock,” “the bully,” “charismatic guy,” “nerdy teacher,” “student concerned about justice,” etc.) While she handles the New Hampshire-boarding-school-in-the-dead-of-winter setting well, I think she could have done more to help readers better visualize the school’s physical plant and understand its ethos and traditions. For me, Granby became simply a generic boarding school, a backdrop, instead of a centuries-old institution with a storied history, illustrious alumnae, and a host of defining traditions.

Regarding the novel’s pace, I found some repetitiveness and instances where the novel seemed to drag. In other words, I didn’t find it as enthralling or as much of a “page-turner” as the promotional materials promised. Narrated by Bodie in the first person, “Questions” includes lots of backstory, rumination, and self-examination; and that tends both to slow things down and to add to the novel’s length. I did think the novel somewhat over-long.

All in all, I enjoyed “I Have Some Questions for You.” But I wasn’t bowled over by it—which is why I’m giving it three stars.

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Joyce C.

Thought provoking read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 20, 2023

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A whodunnit, perfect for true crime and podcast fans, but with real depth. Thought provoking and well-written.

One person found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Free Omar….

Reviewed in Australia on June 23, 2023

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Great read! Very topical, weaves together different angles of the Me Too movement. Gets you thinking about life and how unfair it can be. I’d recommend for mature young adults and adults.

Brechtine

super boek

Reviewed in the Netherlands on April 16, 2023

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Heb dit boek van Rebecca Makkai in vrijwel 1 x uitgelezen. Een super pakkend verhaal, mooi verteld, actueel en bijzonder. Ook de nineties herkenbaar. Zeer aanbevolen!

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Levi Huxton

Thought-provoking page-turner

Reviewed in Australia on April 2, 2023

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Rebecca Makkai, a deserving Pulitzer finalist for her moving second novel The Great Believers, achieves something quite extraordinary with I Have Some Questions For You.

She manages to write an entertaining page-turner about our obsession with true crime that shows both complete command of the genre - this is a whodunnit that kept me awake past 1 a.m. on a school night - and an ability to critique it, and in doing so unpacks the sexism, classism and racism that still define our relationship to crime.

A film critic and podcaster returns to the elite boarding school of her youth to teach a seminar on podcasting. Haunted by the murder of her then roommate Thalia, which resonates with her own personal trauma, she becomes obsessed with proving the convicted killer’s innocence.

Makkai’s brilliance lies in making Thalia a stand-in not just for every beautiful young dead girl that our true crime addiction problematically revolves around, but a prompt to consider all of the women who are abused, still, every single day.

It lies in making her male suspects examples of all of the micro-aggressions and dangerous attitudes we turn a blind eye on, which together create a permission structure that enables violence against women.

It lies in turning her story into an uncomfortable challenge to the reader’s own biases and complicit behaviours. The titular ‘You’ in I Have Some Questions For You refers to a particular suspect, but it may as well refer to the reader.

Makkai thus works against the tendencies of true crime: she de-objectifies the victim, questions our need for sensationalism and the effectiveness of outrage, and seeks out systemic failures over individual ones.

That the novel works both as entertainment and as informed, thoughtful and angry social commentary (including on what we choose to be entertained by) confirms Makkai as a true master of her craft.

One person found this helpful

K

Too long, too dull

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 20, 2023

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A book club suggestion. I suspected it wouldn’t be quite my thing (another girl with her head caved in) but thought at least it might be fun, in a tense, page-turny sort of way. I’d quite liked Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and hoped it might be in that league.
But I had trouble concentrating from the outset. My curiosity wasn’t fired. The writing felt sloppy, the snow-piling of nostalgic detail tedious rather than authenticating. Who were all these people? I definitely didn’t care.
Not even who dunnit. My interest flickered as Jerome’s story came to light but that turned out to be even more superficially handled than the lazy trope of the abusive teacher. We got hints of how the world saw the narrator as exploitative herself, and I wondered if we’d be invited to question her reliability but no, the only switch back was a late penny drop, which barely left a ripple.
Could have been at least 150 pages shorter to tell the same story and still I doubt it would have held my interest.

6 people found this helpful

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FREE delivery: Monday, Oct 2 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.

Ships from: Amazon.com

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