Penance by Eliza Clark (Bibliolifestyle Book Tour)

 

Thank you, Partner @bibliolifestyle @harperperennial for the review copy of Penance by Eliza Clark.

What is the last book that you read that disturbed you?

Penance by Eliza Clark was a disturbingly good novel.  I couldn’t put this book down when I was reading it.  I’m still thinking about it.  In 2016, in a small beachside town in England, a sixteen-year-old girl, named Joan Wilson, was beaten, set on fire, and left for dead by three other teenage girls. What would make these girls do this to another fellow human being that some of them called a friend?  Can we as readers trust the narrator of this novel, journalist Alec Carelli, who has lost a daughter of his own? 

My thoughts on this novel:

·       The format of this novel was very interesting.  It was basically a fictional journalist putting together what happened for this crime.  He divides up the book into sections for the different suspects.  There are interviews, journal entries, articles, the author’s notes, and the author’s fictionalized versions of what he think might have happened. 

·       The unreliable narrator is always intriguing to me.  The author talks about his daughter also having died to some of his interview subjects.  The why of her death was not revealed until the end.  It also was interesting as it reveals that many of the subjects of the book did not agree with how he wrote them and that he may have come by the journal entries through dubious means.  How much is the truth shaped by the person who writes the narrative?

·       I was horrified by the crime and automatically labeled the girls as evil.  As I read each of their stories and delved deeper into their characters, there was a lot more going on.  Each of them was damaged in some way, mostly abandoned by adult figures in their lives, and trying to find a way to cope.

·       One way to cope was that a couple of the girls basically went into dark places online and that translated to their reality.  They became obsessed with American school shootings and one in particular.  One of the girls started writing fan fiction about that particular school shooting.  The fictional slowly became their reality.

·       This really hit home with me as there was recently a school shooter in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin.  He tried to break into the school with a weapon but was shot and killed by the police after he aimed his gun at them and refused to drop it.  It was discovered afterwards that he was obsessed with school shootings and had a false alter ego online that his family knew nothing about.  One of his last posts was that he didn’t know how to get help and get him out of this evil place.  This was exactly what happened to the girls in Penance.

·       It made me ponder, how do we help the youth of today with dealing with social media and mental health?

·       It also made me ponder Wisconsin.  This book was written by an English author and is set in England.  Yet the Slender Man stabbings are discussed a lot and the fictional crime in this book had some of the same elements.  The Slender Man stabbings occurred ten years ago in Waukesha, Wisconsin.  A famous Wisconsin serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer is also discussed.

·       Can we always trust true crime to tell us the truth of a story?  When does being interested in true crime cross the line into an unhealthy obsession?

Favorite Quote, “Even short lives are complex and rich.  Even dead children are full of contradictions and flaws and mysteries that will never be fully understood or solved.”

Overall, Penance was a compelling, complex novel that investigates the dark side of true crime fandom, social media, and how it can impact fragile youth.  It was a disturbing but thoughtful novel.