What do you think?
Rate this book
Penance
Do you know what happened already? Did you know her? Did you see it on the internet? Did you listen to a podcast? Did the hosts make jokes?
Did you see the pictures of the body?
Did you look for them?
It's been years since the horrifying murder of sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson rocked Crow-on-Sea, and the events of that terrible night are now being published for the first time.
That story is Penance, a dizzying feat of masterful storytelling, where Eliza Clark manoeuvres us through accounts from the inhabitants of this small seaside town. Placing us in the capable hands of journalist Alec. Z. Carelli, Clark allows him to construct what he claims is the 'definitive account' of the murder - and what led up to it. Built on hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves, the result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.
The only question how much of it is true?
Did you see the pictures of the body?
Did you look for them?
It's been years since the horrifying murder of sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson rocked Crow-on-Sea, and the events of that terrible night are now being published for the first time.
That story is Penance, a dizzying feat of masterful storytelling, where Eliza Clark manoeuvres us through accounts from the inhabitants of this small seaside town. Placing us in the capable hands of journalist Alec. Z. Carelli, Clark allows him to construct what he claims is the 'definitive account' of the murder - and what led up to it. Built on hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves, the result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.
The only question how much of it is true?
336 pages, ebook
First published July 4, 2023
About the author
Eliza Clark
4 books1,997 followersEliza Clark has relocated from her native Newcastle back to London, where she previously attended Chelsea College of Art. She works in social media marketing, recently having worked for women’s creative writing magazine Mslexia. In 2018, she received a grant from New Writing North’s ‘Young Writers’ Talent Fund’. Clark’s short horror fiction has been published with Tales to Terrify, with an upcoming novelette from Gehenna and Hinnom expected this year. She hosts podcast You Just Don’t Get It, Do You? with her partner, where they discuss film and television which squanders its potential. Boy Parts is her first novel. You can find her @FancyEliza on both Twitter and Instagram.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 4,772 reviews
July 3, 2024
this is the final boss of unreliable narrators.
as someone who abhors true crime, i found reading this exploration of how evil it can be and who has the right to tell a story and what even constitutes "true" extremely satisfying.
and it does so brilliantly, through an unreliable crooked journalist narrator, through the lens of true-crime fandom, through clever workings of sympathy and fact.
i know it can be upsetting to explore our guilty pleasures, but i really recommend this to everyone who "indulges" in people's tragedies as entertainment. it's something that as a society we really must reckon with.
bottom line: a hard and worthy and clever read.
(thank you to the publisher for the e-arc)
as someone who abhors true crime, i found reading this exploration of how evil it can be and who has the right to tell a story and what even constitutes "true" extremely satisfying.
and it does so brilliantly, through an unreliable crooked journalist narrator, through the lens of true-crime fandom, through clever workings of sympathy and fact.
i know it can be upsetting to explore our guilty pleasures, but i really recommend this to everyone who "indulges" in people's tragedies as entertainment. it's something that as a society we really must reckon with.
bottom line: a hard and worthy and clever read.
(thank you to the publisher for the e-arc)
March 25, 2024
I’m definitely damaged from being on 2014 era tumblr, but these girls are objectively worse
October 3, 2023
i loved boy parts and i love eliza clark, so it's not a surprise that this book was perfect for me.
such a dark and compelling narrative. clark packs so much into the book (which doesn't feel dense at all)—toxic internet culture, the dangers of true crime and the dangers of subjectivity in telling an objective story, and about girlhood as well. as someone who was deeply entrenched in the canals of 2010s tumblr, this was such an accurate representation.
full review to come.
thank you to harper for the arc!<3
⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻
pre-read
i would voluntarily eat cement for this.
such a dark and compelling narrative. clark packs so much into the book (which doesn't feel dense at all)—toxic internet culture, the dangers of true crime and the dangers of subjectivity in telling an objective story, and about girlhood as well. as someone who was deeply entrenched in the canals of 2010s tumblr, this was such an accurate representation.
full review to come.
thank you to harper for the arc!<3
⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻
pre-read
i would voluntarily eat cement for this.
January 19, 2024
Although Clark’s second novel Penance takes quite a different approach to her first one (don’t go into this expecting Boy Parts 2.0), her debut gives enough of a hint that she knows how to make a novel like this work.
Relayed by a journalist using witness accounts, interviews, news articles, podcast transcripts, tumblr posts, and correspondence, Penance tells the story of the shocking and gruesome murder among teenagers in a sleepy northern seaside town on the eve of the Brexit vote. Needless to say, the social and political context of the novel sets it up for a lot of interesting commentary, and Clark definitely delivers on this front. The setting of the northern seaside town, Crow-on-Sea, allows Clark to explore the decay of the north/seaside towns, and how dangerous the political and class divides of these towns can become when left to fester.
Alongside this, Penance also provides an unflinching and disturbing look at what has become the true-crime industrial complex, specifically in relation to internet fandom culture. Clark captures the pure malice and nastiness of 2010s internet culture in such a way that you simultaneously recoil in horror and laugh at how accurate it is. She is one of the few authors I’ve read who write about the internet in an authentic way, you can really tell she was in the trenches of Tumblr like the rest of us.
In terms of internet culture, the novel explores how easily the online radicalisation of young, vulnerable people can occur, with fans in online fandom communities like Tumblr feeding into each other’s obsession until everything starts to derail – and to what degree onlookers are complicit as they watch it all unfold in real time.
The characterisation is brilliant, specifically in terms of how Clark writes the teenage characters navigating the discomfort of adolescence and trying to forge a sense of self in a small, suffocating seaside town (relatable). She also perfectly, and horrifyingly, captures the cruelty of teenage female friendship groups and how awful teenagers can be to one another.
All in all, Penance is a compulsive and unsettling examination of the morality of true-crime and how true-crime cases are treated and discussed today, particularly in a post-truth world.
Thank you Faber & Faber for the advanced copy! Penance comes out in the UK on 6 July.
-----------
this is gonna be a tough one for the chronically offline (aka normal people who didn’t have their teenage brains rotted by tumblr and the internet) to understand.
Relayed by a journalist using witness accounts, interviews, news articles, podcast transcripts, tumblr posts, and correspondence, Penance tells the story of the shocking and gruesome murder among teenagers in a sleepy northern seaside town on the eve of the Brexit vote. Needless to say, the social and political context of the novel sets it up for a lot of interesting commentary, and Clark definitely delivers on this front. The setting of the northern seaside town, Crow-on-Sea, allows Clark to explore the decay of the north/seaside towns, and how dangerous the political and class divides of these towns can become when left to fester.
Alongside this, Penance also provides an unflinching and disturbing look at what has become the true-crime industrial complex, specifically in relation to internet fandom culture. Clark captures the pure malice and nastiness of 2010s internet culture in such a way that you simultaneously recoil in horror and laugh at how accurate it is. She is one of the few authors I’ve read who write about the internet in an authentic way, you can really tell she was in the trenches of Tumblr like the rest of us.
In terms of internet culture, the novel explores how easily the online radicalisation of young, vulnerable people can occur, with fans in online fandom communities like Tumblr feeding into each other’s obsession until everything starts to derail – and to what degree onlookers are complicit as they watch it all unfold in real time.
The characterisation is brilliant, specifically in terms of how Clark writes the teenage characters navigating the discomfort of adolescence and trying to forge a sense of self in a small, suffocating seaside town (relatable). She also perfectly, and horrifyingly, captures the cruelty of teenage female friendship groups and how awful teenagers can be to one another.
All in all, Penance is a compulsive and unsettling examination of the morality of true-crime and how true-crime cases are treated and discussed today, particularly in a post-truth world.
Thank you Faber & Faber for the advanced copy! Penance comes out in the UK on 6 July.
-----------
this is gonna be a tough one for the chronically offline (aka normal people who didn’t have their teenage brains rotted by tumblr and the internet) to understand.
July 16, 2023
The true crime was this book's length
June 19, 2023
1) incredible, 2) if you were a tumblr girlie in 2014 you will take psychic damage, and 3) many thanks to google's autofill function for reassuring me that i'm not the only person who thought the cherry creek massacre was real
June 25, 2023
*kylie minogue voice* penance, penance, i hear it and i know
July 2, 2023
This book doesn't know what it wants to be... was it a fictionalized true crime novel? A story about teenage girls who communicate with spirits? A small town with the haves and have nots? A disgraced journalist trying to get his career back? The political ramifications of Brexit? A girl who is obsessed with teen mass murderers? True crime podcasters? Or just a group of mean girls who went too far?
None of it worked for me. I kept putting the book down and it got to the point where I had to write a post-it with everyone's names and who they were because I kept forgetting (or didn't care enough to try to remember).
Additionally, the author wrote as if the teenage girls were actually talking, whether to each other, the journalist, or over text/Tumblr. It got really annoying. If I had a drink every time the word "cringey" was used, I'd be drunk for the entire 2 weeks it took me to read this book.
None of it worked for me. I kept putting the book down and it got to the point where I had to write a post-it with everyone's names and who they were because I kept forgetting (or didn't care enough to try to remember).
Additionally, the author wrote as if the teenage girls were actually talking, whether to each other, the journalist, or over text/Tumblr. It got really annoying. If I had a drink every time the word "cringey" was used, I'd be drunk for the entire 2 weeks it took me to read this book.
January 27, 2024
I hate unreliable narrators!
Or do I? 😏
Or do I? 😏
September 24, 2023
What is this book trying to do? At least one thing too many, that's for sure. I debated giving it 2 stars but gave it 3 in large part because it at least is a book that understands teenagers and social media (in this case we get a whole lot of Tumblr) which you really don't see enough.
This is a novel but it presents itself as a piece of nonfiction. A true crime book. But not just that, a true crime book that was previously pulled from the shelves due to controversy but has now been republished with names changed even though parts of the book have been discredited or challenged. The author was cancelled (and not in an oh no cancel culture way but in an actually wiretapped the people he reported on so literally can't work as a journalist anymore kind of way) and clearly wants this book to bring him back into respectable circles. That is all a lot. And I'm not opposed to it. But it also means that the voice of this novel comes from a man who is truly insufferable and that you're already sick of the moment he appears. It is no fun to follow him as he investigates.
He is also a very bad writer. Which makes you wonder if this is purposeful bad writing or if Clark is the bad writer, a very tricky undertaking. This doesn't feel like any true crime book I've read or heard of. The crime itself--where three teenage girls killed another girl--he unfolds perpetrator by perpetrator, mostly through a single long interview with a parent or family member. There is no flair to the interviews, you read much better ones in magazines every day, they plod along as he asks bad questions and often pokes and prods his subjects. He then writes one chapter of "narrative" that is a fictional account of an incident he's heard described between these girls. It is harder and harder to continue knowing we will just keep having this structure over and over again. We will not get much insight into these girls, quite the opposite.
And this, truly, is the heart of the problem. Our fictional author is terrible at writing about teenage girls. He writes them all as caricatures. They are all mean and obsessive and damaged. They feel so over the top that it is hard to connect with them or understand them. Is this Clark's point? That the true crime industrial complex is turning real people into caricatures? I can't really say. Because there is no contrast here to show that he is wrong, there is just your own lack of connection.
You do see Clark, the Tumblr accuracy first of all. Fair warning there is much discussion of the shipping of school shooters, some deeply disturbing stuff even when presented as all fictional people and crimes as it is here. And there's an understanding of the fluidity of teenage girl groups, the way they can turn on each other and change shape that I absolutely do not believe a middle aged straight man could really understand. That is the paradox here: what is Clark and what is her fictional writer? What is good feels out of place and what is bad overwhelms, but which is which? There are very strong Heavenly Creatures vibes here, with the obsessiveness. Though this book starts with shock value, the details of the crime at the beginning are much harsher than they end up fully playing out at the end.
I can't really tell you what Clark wants to say, but I am pretty sure I would have liked this story more without all the lenses of remove, if it had simply been a novel without the narrative acrobatics.
This is a novel but it presents itself as a piece of nonfiction. A true crime book. But not just that, a true crime book that was previously pulled from the shelves due to controversy but has now been republished with names changed even though parts of the book have been discredited or challenged. The author was cancelled (and not in an oh no cancel culture way but in an actually wiretapped the people he reported on so literally can't work as a journalist anymore kind of way) and clearly wants this book to bring him back into respectable circles. That is all a lot. And I'm not opposed to it. But it also means that the voice of this novel comes from a man who is truly insufferable and that you're already sick of the moment he appears. It is no fun to follow him as he investigates.
He is also a very bad writer. Which makes you wonder if this is purposeful bad writing or if Clark is the bad writer, a very tricky undertaking. This doesn't feel like any true crime book I've read or heard of. The crime itself--where three teenage girls killed another girl--he unfolds perpetrator by perpetrator, mostly through a single long interview with a parent or family member. There is no flair to the interviews, you read much better ones in magazines every day, they plod along as he asks bad questions and often pokes and prods his subjects. He then writes one chapter of "narrative" that is a fictional account of an incident he's heard described between these girls. It is harder and harder to continue knowing we will just keep having this structure over and over again. We will not get much insight into these girls, quite the opposite.
And this, truly, is the heart of the problem. Our fictional author is terrible at writing about teenage girls. He writes them all as caricatures. They are all mean and obsessive and damaged. They feel so over the top that it is hard to connect with them or understand them. Is this Clark's point? That the true crime industrial complex is turning real people into caricatures? I can't really say. Because there is no contrast here to show that he is wrong, there is just your own lack of connection.
You do see Clark, the Tumblr accuracy first of all. Fair warning there is much discussion of the shipping of school shooters, some deeply disturbing stuff even when presented as all fictional people and crimes as it is here. And there's an understanding of the fluidity of teenage girl groups, the way they can turn on each other and change shape that I absolutely do not believe a middle aged straight man could really understand. That is the paradox here: what is Clark and what is her fictional writer? What is good feels out of place and what is bad overwhelms, but which is which? There are very strong Heavenly Creatures vibes here, with the obsessiveness. Though this book starts with shock value, the details of the crime at the beginning are much harsher than they end up fully playing out at the end.
I can't really tell you what Clark wants to say, but I am pretty sure I would have liked this story more without all the lenses of remove, if it had simply been a novel without the narrative acrobatics.
March 7, 2024
penance is the latest installment in “true crime industrial complex criticism” ive come across recently, (may december & anatomy of a fall being top of mind after just being released last year). where this book differs is in clark’s choice to explore the public’s infatuation with true crime through a focus on the digital sphere. everything from online journalist coverage, twitter, podcasts & forums to tumblr fandoms are tackled here. this is so sharp, even darkly funny at times (the yaoi line, good grief lmao) but overall the type of story that really makes you look at the way we engage with true crime as spectators. all while telling a harrowing and tragic story that’s impossible not to devour, but how much of it can you believe?
this was also one of the few books where tumblr was mentioned and it wasn’t cringey because you could tell clark knew what she was talking about lmao. the hype was right go read this now!!
this was also one of the few books where tumblr was mentioned and it wasn’t cringey because you could tell clark knew what she was talking about lmao. the hype was right go read this now!!
June 28, 2023
Eliza Clark’s Penance is a fictional recreation of one of true crime’s most enduring staples the dead-white-girl story. Presented as a new edition of investigative non-fiction by Alec Carelli, Penance centres on the torture and murder of Yorkshire teenager Joan or Joni Wilson by a group of her fellow schoolgirls in 2016 – we’re told Carelli’s original edition was pulled from the shelves in a manner reminiscent of the fate of real-world, crime writer Paul Harrison’s Mind Games. Carelli is an interesting creation, a washed-up, former journalist who’s not ashamed to admit Penance was a bid to cash in on the phenomenal rise of true crime fuelled by online podcasts like Serial. In Carelli Clark has deliberately constructed a narrator who’s deeply suspect, someone almost impossibly distanced from the crime and the environment he’s supposedly interrogating. He’s ruthless enough to exploit his daughter’s death by suicide to get an interview but he’s also an unthinking, posh bloke who clearly knows nothing about the issues of class, gender, and power that this crime evokes. Clark however, a former true crime enthusiast, clearly does know her stuff, convincingly representing the complexities of the genre and its mostly female followers: from fangirling to fanfic. Here and there dropping breadcrumbs that gradually accumulate to undermine Carelli’s version of so-called “facts.”
Clark’s flagged the drawn-out death of American teen Shanda Sharer as a key inspiration but there are distinctive echoes too of the kind of commercial crime fiction devoured by teenage girls – like Carlene Thompson’s In the Event of my Death which revolves around the aftermath of a similar murder. But, like David Peace in his “Red Riding Trilogy,” Clark seems to be using Joni’s murder and its Yorkshire setting, fictional seaside town Crow-on-Sea, to construct an oblique commentary on fault lines in British society particularly those that crisscross the long-neglected North. Joni’s death takes place on the night of the Brexit referendum, highlighted by making one of the killers, Angelica, the daughter of a UKIP politician eager to see his Brexit dreams fulfilled. Like the many actual seaside towns so significant to pro-Brexit campaigns, the predominantly-white Crow-on-Sea is in the throes of inexorable decline. In a county infamous for high levels of violent crime it’s overshadowed by a cabal of right-wing men, a miniature cesspit of small-scale corruption and exploitation: Angelica’s father shamelessly trades on his relative wealth and local clout; he boasts about his former connection to disgraced celebrity Vance Diamond a serial paedophile once active in the area and a ringer for real-life Jimmy Saville; and another of the killers Dorothy or Dolly Hart seems likely to have been sexually abused by her father, a former Yorkshire police officer.
Carelli, however, seems incapable of sustained analysis, lacking the most basic insights. Instead, his method consists of overwhelming his readers, including page upon page of material devoted to Crow-on-Sea’s history and downfall. Carelli sees himself as on a par with acclaimed true crime writers like Brian Masters, Truman Capote and Gordon Burn yet lacks Masters’s readability or Capote and Burn’s stylistic sophistication. He attempts to compensate for his failings by exhaustively recording everything he can lay his hands on; interviews; screenshots of texts between the killers; reconstructions; even podcast transcripts. Carelli’s evident fondness for concepts of deviant youth, the salacious and the emotive, resurrects lingering questions about voyeurism and the ethics of true crime writing. His perspective on events draws on familiar true crime conventions, a genre in which even the most trivial actions of possible perpetrators and victims are often retrospectively heralded as meaningful, even life-changingly significant. Here, like Damien Echols's accusers – whose case Clark mentions in passing - Carelli makes much of the fact that Joni’s killers were fascinated by the occult, oblivious to the many links to well-established, comparatively-tame, teen subcultures tracing back to films like The Craft - even failing to notice a direct reference to this in an interview. But Clark’s various missteps and misapprehensions allows Clark to raise ongoing questions about bias, indirectly contesting true crime’s claims of “truth” and “objectivity,” carefully exposing their mythical nature. Although their themes sometimes overlap Penance doesn't boast the same relentless pace or visceral immediacy of Boy Parts, and there were sections I found less than engaging - although many of its surface flaws are rooted in Carelli’s idea of what makes a good story. But it’s beautifully researched, consistently intelligent, intriguing, and inventive.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Faber for an ARC
Rating: 3.5
Clark’s flagged the drawn-out death of American teen Shanda Sharer as a key inspiration but there are distinctive echoes too of the kind of commercial crime fiction devoured by teenage girls – like Carlene Thompson’s In the Event of my Death which revolves around the aftermath of a similar murder. But, like David Peace in his “Red Riding Trilogy,” Clark seems to be using Joni’s murder and its Yorkshire setting, fictional seaside town Crow-on-Sea, to construct an oblique commentary on fault lines in British society particularly those that crisscross the long-neglected North. Joni’s death takes place on the night of the Brexit referendum, highlighted by making one of the killers, Angelica, the daughter of a UKIP politician eager to see his Brexit dreams fulfilled. Like the many actual seaside towns so significant to pro-Brexit campaigns, the predominantly-white Crow-on-Sea is in the throes of inexorable decline. In a county infamous for high levels of violent crime it’s overshadowed by a cabal of right-wing men, a miniature cesspit of small-scale corruption and exploitation: Angelica’s father shamelessly trades on his relative wealth and local clout; he boasts about his former connection to disgraced celebrity Vance Diamond a serial paedophile once active in the area and a ringer for real-life Jimmy Saville; and another of the killers Dorothy or Dolly Hart seems likely to have been sexually abused by her father, a former Yorkshire police officer.
Carelli, however, seems incapable of sustained analysis, lacking the most basic insights. Instead, his method consists of overwhelming his readers, including page upon page of material devoted to Crow-on-Sea’s history and downfall. Carelli sees himself as on a par with acclaimed true crime writers like Brian Masters, Truman Capote and Gordon Burn yet lacks Masters’s readability or Capote and Burn’s stylistic sophistication. He attempts to compensate for his failings by exhaustively recording everything he can lay his hands on; interviews; screenshots of texts between the killers; reconstructions; even podcast transcripts. Carelli’s evident fondness for concepts of deviant youth, the salacious and the emotive, resurrects lingering questions about voyeurism and the ethics of true crime writing. His perspective on events draws on familiar true crime conventions, a genre in which even the most trivial actions of possible perpetrators and victims are often retrospectively heralded as meaningful, even life-changingly significant. Here, like Damien Echols's accusers – whose case Clark mentions in passing - Carelli makes much of the fact that Joni’s killers were fascinated by the occult, oblivious to the many links to well-established, comparatively-tame, teen subcultures tracing back to films like The Craft - even failing to notice a direct reference to this in an interview. But Clark’s various missteps and misapprehensions allows Clark to raise ongoing questions about bias, indirectly contesting true crime’s claims of “truth” and “objectivity,” carefully exposing their mythical nature. Although their themes sometimes overlap Penance doesn't boast the same relentless pace or visceral immediacy of Boy Parts, and there were sections I found less than engaging - although many of its surface flaws are rooted in Carelli’s idea of what makes a good story. But it’s beautifully researched, consistently intelligent, intriguing, and inventive.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Faber for an ARC
Rating: 3.5
January 20, 2024
experienced major psychic damage from all the 2013 tumblr references. "get off your high horse bitch you're literally reading school shooter fanfic" "she's reblogging tonnes and tonnes of thirst traps about the cast of cats" i mean god
August 1, 2024
3 stars | ★★★
𓏲ּ ⚖️ ִֶָ 𓂃⊹ ִֶָ
in its entirety, penance was captivating; i wanted to see exactly where the story was going and how it would all come together. but that didn't stop the writing from feeling unnecessarily tedious at times [why are we going on a tangent to discuss every minuscule detail about this town and each parent's backstory for the 397340th time?] i get that it's supposed to mimic a "non-fiction" story. i get that understanding the parents will help us understand these characters and why they did that horrible crime. i can get something and still feel annoyed at the redundancy, though. the hard-to-follow writing may have played a part in my annoyance.
ꗃ but hey - i felt compelled to continue, so i guess that aligns with the message of this book :p
𓏲ּ ⚖️ ִֶָ 𓂃⊹ ִֶָ
in its entirety, penance was captivating; i wanted to see exactly where the story was going and how it would all come together. but that didn't stop the writing from feeling unnecessarily tedious at times [why are we going on a tangent to discuss every minuscule detail about this town and each parent's backstory for the 397340th time?] i get that it's supposed to mimic a "non-fiction" story. i get that understanding the parents will help us understand these characters and why they did that horrible crime. i can get something and still feel annoyed at the redundancy, though. the hard-to-follow writing may have played a part in my annoyance.
ꗃ but hey - i felt compelled to continue, so i guess that aligns with the message of this book :p
July 11, 2023
I've just finished reading this and am still picking through my impressions...
Firstly, it's compulsive reading though not quite what I expected from the blurb. The main substance is a dark 'Mean Girls' story that concentrates heavily on female adolescence and in-school groupings, falling outs, bullying, jealousy and toxic friendship. The role of social media and online communities is important both in the 'inset' story of the brutal murder of a schoolgirl by her peers, and in the framing narrative.
The latter lends the whole book a meta feel: with a preface that details this book we're about to read had been withdrawn due to post-publishing allegations about the author who had already been sacked from the tabloid Polaris for his role in the phone hacking scandal, there is a dizzying set of layers as a piece of fiction purports to be true crime which turns out, in the fiction, to have been partly made up.
Alongside the crime focus is a detailed depiction of a small run-down coastal town situated between Scarborough and Whitby. The beats here are woven in seamlessly: from the Dracula connection of Whitby to the witch trials, to the local UKIP MP and a Jimmy Saville-alike abuser-in-plain-sight local 'hero'.
The narrative itself comprises a range of modes of writing: from podcast scripts to 1st person narrative from the author of the true crime book, to Q&A transcriptions of interviews and online message boards.
In the end, I had expected this to be more obviously a representation of a manipulative fictional author and while there are gestures in the main body of the text, this aspect only really tops and tails the narrative. Instead, this is exhaustive on the lives of female adolescents treated in turn with all the daily fractures of friendship, and the influences that create their world from household secrets and pressures to online obsessions with killers.
Clark doesn't tie up all the loose ends and is happy to leave strands as suggestive without confirmation so that we still have some work to do as readers. I'd see this book as in conversation with Truman Capote's name-checked In Cold Blood and also with more recent books like Joseph Knox's True Crime Story and Rebecca Makkai's I Have Some Questions For You.
Firstly, it's compulsive reading though not quite what I expected from the blurb. The main substance is a dark 'Mean Girls' story that concentrates heavily on female adolescence and in-school groupings, falling outs, bullying, jealousy and toxic friendship. The role of social media and online communities is important both in the 'inset' story of the brutal murder of a schoolgirl by her peers, and in the framing narrative.
The latter lends the whole book a meta feel: with a preface that details this book we're about to read had been withdrawn due to post-publishing allegations about the author who had already been sacked from the tabloid Polaris for his role in the phone hacking scandal, there is a dizzying set of layers as a piece of fiction purports to be true crime which turns out, in the fiction, to have been partly made up.
Alongside the crime focus is a detailed depiction of a small run-down coastal town situated between Scarborough and Whitby. The beats here are woven in seamlessly: from the Dracula connection of Whitby to the witch trials, to the local UKIP MP and a Jimmy Saville-alike abuser-in-plain-sight local 'hero'.
The narrative itself comprises a range of modes of writing: from podcast scripts to 1st person narrative from the author of the true crime book, to Q&A transcriptions of interviews and online message boards.
In the end, I had expected this to be more obviously a representation of a manipulative fictional author and while there are gestures in the main body of the text, this aspect only really tops and tails the narrative. Instead, this is exhaustive on the lives of female adolescents treated in turn with all the daily fractures of friendship, and the influences that create their world from household secrets and pressures to online obsessions with killers.
Clark doesn't tie up all the loose ends and is happy to leave strands as suggestive without confirmation so that we still have some work to do as readers. I'd see this book as in conversation with Truman Capote's name-checked In Cold Blood and also with more recent books like Joseph Knox's True Crime Story and Rebecca Makkai's I Have Some Questions For You.
October 16, 2023
Penance is, first and foremost, a novel about crafting your own narrative. It features a gallery of varyingly unreliable, manipulative characters who—consciously or not—are all supremely concerned with creating a self-serving story to absolve themselves from any responsibility in the book’s central event, the gruesome murder of a teenage girl.
In her sophomore work, Eliza Clark demonstrates an exceptional ability to develop unique, convincing character voices that are as unsettling as they are realistic. This is a very dark novel, and yet every aspect of it is brought to life in vivid detail, as if the author had a profound knowledge of the setting, social dynamics, and cultural context these characters live in. Entire chapters are dedicated to the history and lore of the English coastal town where the events take place; long paragraphs are devoted to unravelling the intricate politics of teen friend groups; and, perhaps most surprisingly, great attention is paid to the structure and dynamics of online fandom spaces.
As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time in these spaces, I found Clark’s rendition embarrassingly accurate. I don’t think any other author has ever managed to capture the exact tone and voice of a Tumblr community the way she did in this book. There were excerpts from fictional posts and conversations that made me laugh out loud for how closely they resembled the kind of delirious content you see every day on these platforms. I found myself both cringing away from and delighting in these sections of the story, but most of all, I was amazed at the author’s ability to faithfully re-create such very specific interactions in a different medium.
I also really appreciated the commentary this book provided on the true crime industry. Clark has a talent for developing deeply flawed and unlikeable characters who completely lack self-awareness, to the point that they are oblivious to how awful their actions look to external observers. This, combined with the tonal dissonance that characterizes the true crime content satirized here (think podcast hosts making jokes about murder victims, or blog posts about how attractive serial killers look), gave the story a grotesque and often absurd quality.
What I personally found most disturbing was the characters’ sense of moral righteousness, their insistence that their own actions were invariably morally superior to those of the other people involved in the case. If you’ve spent any time on the internet or in the real world, you know that this is exactly how most people react to discovering that their mindless behavior has led to devastating consequences for someone else: they rush to create a self-absolving narrative that allows them to avoid accountability for what they did.
The only character who isn’t given a chance to construct such an alibi for herself is Dolly, the crazy girl, the one whose voice remains truly absent from the story. Dolly is the perpetual scapegoat, the deranged psycho, the black hole no one—not even a predatory journalist with a vivid imagination—can ever see through.
She is the real outcast in a book where everyone claims to be an outcast, and for this she will suffer the harshest punishment.
In her sophomore work, Eliza Clark demonstrates an exceptional ability to develop unique, convincing character voices that are as unsettling as they are realistic. This is a very dark novel, and yet every aspect of it is brought to life in vivid detail, as if the author had a profound knowledge of the setting, social dynamics, and cultural context these characters live in. Entire chapters are dedicated to the history and lore of the English coastal town where the events take place; long paragraphs are devoted to unravelling the intricate politics of teen friend groups; and, perhaps most surprisingly, great attention is paid to the structure and dynamics of online fandom spaces.
As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time in these spaces, I found Clark’s rendition embarrassingly accurate. I don’t think any other author has ever managed to capture the exact tone and voice of a Tumblr community the way she did in this book. There were excerpts from fictional posts and conversations that made me laugh out loud for how closely they resembled the kind of delirious content you see every day on these platforms. I found myself both cringing away from and delighting in these sections of the story, but most of all, I was amazed at the author’s ability to faithfully re-create such very specific interactions in a different medium.
I also really appreciated the commentary this book provided on the true crime industry. Clark has a talent for developing deeply flawed and unlikeable characters who completely lack self-awareness, to the point that they are oblivious to how awful their actions look to external observers. This, combined with the tonal dissonance that characterizes the true crime content satirized here (think podcast hosts making jokes about murder victims, or blog posts about how attractive serial killers look), gave the story a grotesque and often absurd quality.
What I personally found most disturbing was the characters’ sense of moral righteousness, their insistence that their own actions were invariably morally superior to those of the other people involved in the case. If you’ve spent any time on the internet or in the real world, you know that this is exactly how most people react to discovering that their mindless behavior has led to devastating consequences for someone else: they rush to create a self-absolving narrative that allows them to avoid accountability for what they did.
The only character who isn’t given a chance to construct such an alibi for herself is Dolly, the crazy girl, the one whose voice remains truly absent from the story. Dolly is the perpetual scapegoat, the deranged psycho, the black hole no one—not even a predatory journalist with a vivid imagination—can ever see through.
She is the real outcast in a book where everyone claims to be an outcast, and for this she will suffer the harshest punishment.
March 5, 2024
girlhood 👎🏽
July 25, 2023
Oh the “I watch true crime to relax” girlies are gonna hate this one
December 18, 2023
ELIZA CLARK TURNED MY WORLD UPSIDE DOWN!
Hands down one of the best books I've read this year.
I'm writing this review right after finishing the book, in hopes of it being an emotional turmoil and encapsulating just how strong and animalistic this book actually was.
GENERAL PRAISE: I've previously read Boy Parts by the same author. I kid you not, I think about that book at least once a day. I remember it being disgusting and vile, pretentious and aggravating, I remember it changing my life. This was so different from that book, different setting, different characters, different narrating technique. It was equally infuriating and equally life-changing. So no, Eliza Clark is not a one time hit author, she's here to stay. Strong messages sometimes need gross packaging in order for them to arrive early and straight to the cortex of your brain! Scratch that, even my limbic system felt this book and I'm forever grateful for that. The funny part is that, when starting the book, I did not expect it to be a 5 star read. It was 3.5-4 until the last 1/3. Then the bricks started forming a wall that hit me right me on the forehead. This was brilliant!
THE PLOT AND TRIGGER WARNINGS A school girl from a small town was brutally murdered by her colleagues, three different girls with different backgrounds and different lives. What brought them together and made them set their friend on fire? An ex-journalist and failed writer is determined to find out. This is their (and his iykyk) story.
This is not a thriller. It's so realistic and so gut-wrenching. I want to hug the author and also vomit all over the carpet. Content warning for suicide, SA, self harm, eating disorders, child abuse, mass murders. Don't read this if you're easily triggered, your mental health matters more than this book being good!
I came for the story, the mystery, the why, I stayed for the HOW, how can this author see the sickness of the world we live in today so well, explain it to the very detail and leave you breathless. You think you're in for a murder case, you're in for a life lesson.
Thank you Eliza Clark, please write more, I feel like even your grocery list would shake me to my core. 🤭🤭❤️❤️
Hands down one of the best books I've read this year.
I'm writing this review right after finishing the book, in hopes of it being an emotional turmoil and encapsulating just how strong and animalistic this book actually was.
GENERAL PRAISE: I've previously read Boy Parts by the same author. I kid you not, I think about that book at least once a day. I remember it being disgusting and vile, pretentious and aggravating, I remember it changing my life. This was so different from that book, different setting, different characters, different narrating technique. It was equally infuriating and equally life-changing. So no, Eliza Clark is not a one time hit author, she's here to stay. Strong messages sometimes need gross packaging in order for them to arrive early and straight to the cortex of your brain! Scratch that, even my limbic system felt this book and I'm forever grateful for that. The funny part is that, when starting the book, I did not expect it to be a 5 star read. It was 3.5-4 until the last 1/3. Then the bricks started forming a wall that hit me right me on the forehead. This was brilliant!
THE PLOT AND TRIGGER WARNINGS A school girl from a small town was brutally murdered by her colleagues, three different girls with different backgrounds and different lives. What brought them together and made them set their friend on fire? An ex-journalist and failed writer is determined to find out. This is their (and his iykyk) story.
This is not a thriller. It's so realistic and so gut-wrenching. I want to hug the author and also vomit all over the carpet. Content warning for suicide, SA, self harm, eating disorders, child abuse, mass murders. Don't read this if you're easily triggered, your mental health matters more than this book being good!
I came for the story, the mystery, the why, I stayed for the HOW, how can this author see the sickness of the world we live in today so well, explain it to the very detail and leave you breathless. You think you're in for a murder case, you're in for a life lesson.
Thank you Eliza Clark, please write more, I feel like even your grocery list would shake me to my core. 🤭🤭❤️❤️
March 27, 2024
The premise of this novel is brilliant: "Penance" tells the story of three girls who murder their 16-year-old classmate Joan by torturing her and then setting her on fire, but the whole thing is presented as a highly controversial book by a shady (and thus: unreliable) journalist named Alec Z. Carelli who unscrupulously exploits the true crime trend for his financial gain, ethics be damned. What the text aims to do is to illuminate how true crime appeals to the lowest urges in consumers of topical media like podcasts, message boards, fanfic communities, but also classical print, audiovisual and digital media. Clark wants to write about all of us by vividly dissecting the gruesome details of a (fictional) murder case and the darkest corners of human minds - a worthwhile endeavor. I also applaud her for taking an experimental road by incorporating styles of different media and various forms of communication, all presented as the final product of the narrator's messed-up reporting.
But alas, the novel is just way, way too long: Readers easily get what Clark is going for here, what her message will be and that the details (who of the three girls did what exactly) basically do not matter for the impact of the story. Also, there is no definitive why, which makes sense as the author seems heavily influenced by the psychology of and public fascination with school shooters, especially Columbine (check out Cullen's nonfiction account Columbine, it's excellent). What would render the text successful as an aesthetically forward piece is the integration of its text forms and perspectives to a stringent whole which flows somewhat smoothly. And this is my biggest critique: The centrifugal forces of the material rip the book apart, and the pieces keep meandering off, forcing me to come along, away from the central story line.
Clark has structured the novel in five parts: The introductory epigraph, then the stories of Angelica, Violet, and Dolly who become murderers, then a section about another girl who was initially incorrectly suspected to be one of the perpetrators, and at last the aftermath, focusing again on the narrator. And as this is criticizing true crime, the victim, Joan, plays a rather insignificant role in the depiction of her own death: It's the "monsters" that generate clicks (need an antidote? here you go: Notes on an Execution). There is a lot in here from internet boards, and podcast excerpts, and media coverage, and interviews the narrator conducts, and reconstructions he writes that are clearly their own form of fiction. Everything happens on the day before Brexit in a struggling (and fictional) coastal town in North Yorkshire, but the political climate plays a minor role: It's more about social dynamics in school, about family backgrounds, and the strife for recognition as experienced by teenagers.
While I especially appreciated how Clarke presented unregulated areas of the internet where serial killers and violence in general are sources for fanfiction and rabbit holes offer unstable minds plenty of opportunities to lose grip on reality, I have to admit that during the first half of this long novel, I really struggled to keep my interest. There is not enough narrative discipline, and there is too much material for what the plot and the message would merit. Eliza Clark still remains a fascinating talent and I'm curiously awaiting her next effort.
But alas, the novel is just way, way too long: Readers easily get what Clark is going for here, what her message will be and that the details (who of the three girls did what exactly) basically do not matter for the impact of the story. Also, there is no definitive why, which makes sense as the author seems heavily influenced by the psychology of and public fascination with school shooters, especially Columbine (check out Cullen's nonfiction account Columbine, it's excellent). What would render the text successful as an aesthetically forward piece is the integration of its text forms and perspectives to a stringent whole which flows somewhat smoothly. And this is my biggest critique: The centrifugal forces of the material rip the book apart, and the pieces keep meandering off, forcing me to come along, away from the central story line.
Clark has structured the novel in five parts: The introductory epigraph, then the stories of Angelica, Violet, and Dolly who become murderers, then a section about another girl who was initially incorrectly suspected to be one of the perpetrators, and at last the aftermath, focusing again on the narrator. And as this is criticizing true crime, the victim, Joan, plays a rather insignificant role in the depiction of her own death: It's the "monsters" that generate clicks (need an antidote? here you go: Notes on an Execution). There is a lot in here from internet boards, and podcast excerpts, and media coverage, and interviews the narrator conducts, and reconstructions he writes that are clearly their own form of fiction. Everything happens on the day before Brexit in a struggling (and fictional) coastal town in North Yorkshire, but the political climate plays a minor role: It's more about social dynamics in school, about family backgrounds, and the strife for recognition as experienced by teenagers.
While I especially appreciated how Clarke presented unregulated areas of the internet where serial killers and violence in general are sources for fanfiction and rabbit holes offer unstable minds plenty of opportunities to lose grip on reality, I have to admit that during the first half of this long novel, I really struggled to keep my interest. There is not enough narrative discipline, and there is too much material for what the plot and the message would merit. Eliza Clark still remains a fascinating talent and I'm curiously awaiting her next effort.
September 7, 2023
Where is the editor?! This book is far longer than it needs to be and is filled with editing errors, incongruous timelines, digressions, and just generally lacks direction (granted it is a review copy). It is also a book within a book, which effectively makes it so that the real author or fans of this can shrug off all of the aforementioned issues, say they are intentional and the “fault” of the fictional author.
I also don’t think this is the brilliant indictment on true crime that other readers seem to think it is. Reading interviews with the author, it appears the fictional murder is based off at least one or two real life murders and the author has been and is still into true crime, originally writing this book because she was just interested in the real life cases and the ethics of true crime weren’t even on her mind until she was halfway through writing it. In an interview, she says she eventually decided to “do something more critical” with the book once she had read and listened to more high quality true crime and was disturbed by the bottom of the barrel podcasts existing only for shock value and profit.
So, sure—the novel criticizes the “shitty reporting” and “lack of objectivity” in these podcasts (represented in the book by one titled “I Peed On Your Grave”) and highlights the influence niche toxic internet fandoms can have on developing minds, but does stating the obvious really make this a successful cultural critique on an entire genre? I don’t think so, but I’m also not surprised to see readers loving this, proud to be given the chance to step up on their moral high horse and repeat the same unoriginal comments. This isn’t me advocating for more true crime, or absolving many true crime storytellers of doing damage to real people. But it is me wishing for a more nuanced conversation that involves more analysis and less virtue signaling.
(I think I Have Some Questions For You does a better job at exploring the complexities of this topic and forcing the reader to ponder its many grey areas)
The “unreliable narrator” aspect was granted a few unconvincing pages at the end and perhaps was intended to make the reader rethink everything they’d just read and question the morality of true crime writing, but instead felt like a quickly constructed excuse for the 400+ pages of bad writing and storytelling.
“This book is not believable as a work of investigative nonfiction, which renders its conceit annoying rather than provocative”. (Kirkus Review of Penance)
Despite the length and other myriad of issues, this was compulsively readable and I think Clark did a great job of recreating some aspects of the early 2010’s Tumblr scene. For me, this was intriguing in a contemporary thriller type way. “Brilliant” and “cleverly nuanced”? Not so much.
(yes I’m aware that I bitched ab the length of the book and then proceeded to write a novel of a review 🙃)
I also don’t think this is the brilliant indictment on true crime that other readers seem to think it is. Reading interviews with the author, it appears the fictional murder is based off at least one or two real life murders and the author has been and is still into true crime, originally writing this book because she was just interested in the real life cases and the ethics of true crime weren’t even on her mind until she was halfway through writing it. In an interview, she says she eventually decided to “do something more critical” with the book once she had read and listened to more high quality true crime and was disturbed by the bottom of the barrel podcasts existing only for shock value and profit.
So, sure—the novel criticizes the “shitty reporting” and “lack of objectivity” in these podcasts (represented in the book by one titled “I Peed On Your Grave”) and highlights the influence niche toxic internet fandoms can have on developing minds, but does stating the obvious really make this a successful cultural critique on an entire genre? I don’t think so, but I’m also not surprised to see readers loving this, proud to be given the chance to step up on their moral high horse and repeat the same unoriginal comments. This isn’t me advocating for more true crime, or absolving many true crime storytellers of doing damage to real people. But it is me wishing for a more nuanced conversation that involves more analysis and less virtue signaling.
(I think I Have Some Questions For You does a better job at exploring the complexities of this topic and forcing the reader to ponder its many grey areas)
The “unreliable narrator” aspect was granted a few unconvincing pages at the end and perhaps was intended to make the reader rethink everything they’d just read and question the morality of true crime writing, but instead felt like a quickly constructed excuse for the 400+ pages of bad writing and storytelling.
“This book is not believable as a work of investigative nonfiction, which renders its conceit annoying rather than provocative”. (Kirkus Review of Penance)
Despite the length and other myriad of issues, this was compulsively readable and I think Clark did a great job of recreating some aspects of the early 2010’s Tumblr scene. For me, this was intriguing in a contemporary thriller type way. “Brilliant” and “cleverly nuanced”? Not so much.
(yes I’m aware that I bitched ab the length of the book and then proceeded to write a novel of a review 🙃)
August 11, 2023
I wasn't even able to finish Eliza Clark's debut, Boy Parts, so color me surprised when my interest was piqued when her sophomore novel hit NetGalley. Here's an example of when I'm glad to have given an author another chance. This book isn't perfect by any means, I'll discuss that in a bit, but it's leaps and bounds better than her debut, in my opinion.
"At around 4:30 a.m., on 23 June 2016, sixteen year old Joan Wilson was doused in petrol and set on fire after enduring several hours of torture in a small beach chalet. Her assailants were three other teenage girls - all four girls attended the same high school."
Wow, right? I couldn't wait to dig into the nitty gritty details of how things went so wrong for these young women and I was not disappointed.
A disgraced journalist decides he wants to tell this story after hearing about it on a podcast. He heads to Crow-on-sea where he interviews family members of the victim and perpetrators, as well as other friends of the girls. He does a deep dive into the girls social media presence to try to really get a grip on the state of minds these young women had leading up to this heinous crime.
So this book is actually a fictional story parading around like a true crime novel and I kind of love it for that.
But, it wasn't all roses. There were a few things I could have lived without.
My first and biggest complaint is that this book is much too long. Too much time was given to the towns history. I don't care about what Viking discovered it or how it got it's name.
The social media posts were much too many. While I understand how important social media is to our youth today, and how it allows us a glimpse into the girls minds and thoughts, I think these could have been scaled back a bit. All the acronyms and slang for a dinosaur like myself made these very tedious to read.
All the talk about pocket hells and magic are not my personal preference so I would skim these scenes when the girls would drone on and on about it. Again, I realize this is setting the tone and showing how truly messed up these young ladies were but...whatever, I didn't enjoy it.
So with a few minor tweaks this could really be sensational and the pacing would improve tremendously.
The ending to this novel will be divisive among readers but I actually thought it was really well done.
So there were some hits and some misses but in the end I am glad to have taken this twisted journey to the truth....or is it true? You be the judge. 3.5 stars!
Thank you to NetGalley and Harper for my complimentary copy.
"At around 4:30 a.m., on 23 June 2016, sixteen year old Joan Wilson was doused in petrol and set on fire after enduring several hours of torture in a small beach chalet. Her assailants were three other teenage girls - all four girls attended the same high school."
Wow, right? I couldn't wait to dig into the nitty gritty details of how things went so wrong for these young women and I was not disappointed.
A disgraced journalist decides he wants to tell this story after hearing about it on a podcast. He heads to Crow-on-sea where he interviews family members of the victim and perpetrators, as well as other friends of the girls. He does a deep dive into the girls social media presence to try to really get a grip on the state of minds these young women had leading up to this heinous crime.
So this book is actually a fictional story parading around like a true crime novel and I kind of love it for that.
But, it wasn't all roses. There were a few things I could have lived without.
My first and biggest complaint is that this book is much too long. Too much time was given to the towns history. I don't care about what Viking discovered it or how it got it's name.
The social media posts were much too many. While I understand how important social media is to our youth today, and how it allows us a glimpse into the girls minds and thoughts, I think these could have been scaled back a bit. All the acronyms and slang for a dinosaur like myself made these very tedious to read.
All the talk about pocket hells and magic are not my personal preference so I would skim these scenes when the girls would drone on and on about it. Again, I realize this is setting the tone and showing how truly messed up these young ladies were but...whatever, I didn't enjoy it.
So with a few minor tweaks this could really be sensational and the pacing would improve tremendously.
The ending to this novel will be divisive among readers but I actually thought it was really well done.
So there were some hits and some misses but in the end I am glad to have taken this twisted journey to the truth....or is it true? You be the judge. 3.5 stars!
Thank you to NetGalley and Harper for my complimentary copy.
July 5, 2023
The setting of Penance (a Northern seaside town in decline), the crux of the plot (what is the truth about a notorious murder that took place seven years ago?), and the format (a mixed-media approach incorporating lots of interviews) all make it feel like a long-lost cousin of the Six Stories series, though here the medium is a true-crime book written by a shifty journalist – think Joseph Knox’s
True Crime Story
– rather than a podcast. The crime at its centre is the gruesome death of a teenager after she was set on fire by three classmates. Like an ever-growing number of modern novels about murder, it’s concerned with the mechanics of true crime and how ‘true’ it ever really is, though I don’t think Clark’s concern lies as much with the ‘ethics of true crime’ as it does with the messiness of ‘the truth’ and how we come to decide what we believe. What is truth, really, when there is no single tidy, complete version of a story?
But more than that, and above all, it’s a book about teenage girlhood. The plasticity of identities at this age; how friendships can so easily curdle into enmity (or, really, were only ever enmity in the first place). How a strange idea – a piece of local folklore, or something from the internet – can fatefully take hold. How all this continues to define a person for years to come, maybe even forever: as one character says, ‘there’s a bit of you that’s always a teenager, isn’t there?’ And it’s even more specifically about the experience of the late-millennial, borderline-Gen-Z micro-generation whose adolescence coincided with the boom years of Tumblr.
Penance doesn’t quite pack the same punch as Boy Parts because it isn’t driven by a single voice. Yet it’s more immediately a book I want to reread, a book I’m already looking forward to revisiting. I can’t get enough of the method of telling a story like this through a multitude of accounts: when they’re written well (and this is) these are one of my favourite types of books, such an effective way of getting under the skin of a place/community/event/anything, really. Clark also seamlessly folds elements of online culture into the story, something that’s easy to get wrong but here rings true. I’m all for more layered, choral, shifting-truth narratives like this: I love Six Stories, I loved this one (I’d honestly be delighted if this turned into a series as well), I hope it’s huge and sparks off a whole new wave of them.
I received an advance review copy of Penance from the publisher through NetGalley.
But more than that, and above all, it’s a book about teenage girlhood. The plasticity of identities at this age; how friendships can so easily curdle into enmity (or, really, were only ever enmity in the first place). How a strange idea – a piece of local folklore, or something from the internet – can fatefully take hold. How all this continues to define a person for years to come, maybe even forever: as one character says, ‘there’s a bit of you that’s always a teenager, isn’t there?’ And it’s even more specifically about the experience of the late-millennial, borderline-Gen-Z micro-generation whose adolescence coincided with the boom years of Tumblr.
Penance doesn’t quite pack the same punch as Boy Parts because it isn’t driven by a single voice. Yet it’s more immediately a book I want to reread, a book I’m already looking forward to revisiting. I can’t get enough of the method of telling a story like this through a multitude of accounts: when they’re written well (and this is) these are one of my favourite types of books, such an effective way of getting under the skin of a place/community/event/anything, really. Clark also seamlessly folds elements of online culture into the story, something that’s easy to get wrong but here rings true. I’m all for more layered, choral, shifting-truth narratives like this: I love Six Stories, I loved this one (I’d honestly be delighted if this turned into a series as well), I hope it’s huge and sparks off a whole new wave of them.
I received an advance review copy of Penance from the publisher through NetGalley.
February 5, 2023
This book is for girlies who had 2000 tumblr followers and online ‘friends’ in their 20s when they were 14. If you’re not girlies with 2000 tumblr followers and a semi-recent true crime podcast ick keep scrolling. 😌
March 24, 2024
The one thought at the forefront of my mind as I finished this book was: "No way this is only 336 pages."
I liked the concept of this book. I'm not into the whole true crime thing, but I am interested in the psychology of our societal obsession with it. Plus, the opening was really gruesome and horrible, which, if I'm being honest, did get my attention. It just really didn't prepare me for what a drawn-out, slow read this is.
Penance tries to do a lot, to the point where I'm not even sure exactly what the author was trying to say here, what book she wanted to write. There is a massive cast of characters, loads of detail, loads of backstory-- most of which felt unnecessary, especially the parents' backstories --lots of teenagers being shitty to each other, speaking in Teenglish to the point I could barely stand to read the dialogue.
The narrator-- journalist Alec Z. Carelli --is pretty unreliable, not to mention unlikable, from the start. At this point, I am pretty tired of the unreliable narrator trope, especially when it is clear from the beginning and not a twist. The problem is that nothing they say matters to me because I can't be sure any of it is true... so why bother listening?
He also has a very dry, boring journalistic style. He's working with pretty good material here, but he drains every bit of enjoyment out of it by taking us on long interviews that are 90% pointless. To the author's credit, I do think the choices made in this book were intentional and were supposed to show how true crime journalists misrepresent real people for their stories, but god, it was a chore to get through.
It was a very slow, dense, hard-going read.
I liked the concept of this book. I'm not into the whole true crime thing, but I am interested in the psychology of our societal obsession with it. Plus, the opening was really gruesome and horrible, which, if I'm being honest, did get my attention. It just really didn't prepare me for what a drawn-out, slow read this is.
Penance tries to do a lot, to the point where I'm not even sure exactly what the author was trying to say here, what book she wanted to write. There is a massive cast of characters, loads of detail, loads of backstory-- most of which felt unnecessary, especially the parents' backstories --lots of teenagers being shitty to each other, speaking in Teenglish to the point I could barely stand to read the dialogue.
The narrator-- journalist Alec Z. Carelli --is pretty unreliable, not to mention unlikable, from the start. At this point, I am pretty tired of the unreliable narrator trope, especially when it is clear from the beginning and not a twist. The problem is that nothing they say matters to me because I can't be sure any of it is true... so why bother listening?
He also has a very dry, boring journalistic style. He's working with pretty good material here, but he drains every bit of enjoyment out of it by taking us on long interviews that are 90% pointless. To the author's credit, I do think the choices made in this book were intentional and were supposed to show how true crime journalists misrepresent real people for their stories, but god, it was a chore to get through.
It was a very slow, dense, hard-going read.
August 25, 2024
Very entertaining book for the most part. A few dull passages but overall I thought Eliza Clark’s writing brought the true crime genre and its associated ugliness to life in an attention-keeping way. The novel follows, in a journalistic format, three girls who set a classmate of theirs on fire and kill her. There are some disturbing parts where Clark describes the violence so watch out for that if you’re squeamish. For most of the book though, Clark explores the problematically normalized bullying and aggression between teen girls, the effects of internet culture (i.e., Tumblr) in glorifying and condoning violence, and how class and trauma affects these girls’ lives.
The way Clark ended the novel was an interesting choice. I’m not sure exactly how I feel about it though it does invite critical thinking regarding the sensationalism of the true crime genre and how people exploit it, instead of really taking action to prevent violence from happening in the first place. I think Penance would be worth discussing in a book club or with friends.
The way Clark ended the novel was an interesting choice. I’m not sure exactly how I feel about it though it does invite critical thinking regarding the sensationalism of the true crime genre and how people exploit it, instead of really taking action to prevent violence from happening in the first place. I think Penance would be worth discussing in a book club or with friends.
February 5, 2023
Based on the grisly (fictional) murder of schoolgirl Joan Wilson by a trio of teens in the decaying seaside town of Crow-on-Sea, Penance blends a faux true crime narrative with interviews, tumblr posts, Discord chats, emails, podcast transcripts, serial killer fanfic, articles and extracts.
The pastiche structure reminds me of recent banger True Story by Kate Reed Petty, or Carrie by Stephen King but, Eliza being Eliza, Penance is truly one of a kind. A compulsive rollercoaster of murder, 2010s internet culture, urban decay in the northeast, and the cruelty of adolescence. I was completely swallowed by it, and felt a morbid sorrow to see it end. Eliza is just so astute, and the examination of true crime is second to none.
Boy Parts was always going to be a tough act to follow, and Penance rises to the challenge – and engulfs it in flames. An unmissable banger that you need to preorder immediately.
The pastiche structure reminds me of recent banger True Story by Kate Reed Petty, or Carrie by Stephen King but, Eliza being Eliza, Penance is truly one of a kind. A compulsive rollercoaster of murder, 2010s internet culture, urban decay in the northeast, and the cruelty of adolescence. I was completely swallowed by it, and felt a morbid sorrow to see it end. Eliza is just so astute, and the examination of true crime is second to none.
Boy Parts was always going to be a tough act to follow, and Penance rises to the challenge – and engulfs it in flames. An unmissable banger that you need to preorder immediately.
September 13, 2023
2.5. This might be colored by just having read a bunch of very good books about perma-online, fucked up teenage girls, but my god was this not worth the read. Clark wastes huge swaths of time over-explaining each character's backstory and following too many threads (why did we need to get into Mad Bob, Crow-on-the-Sea's historical background, podcast excerpts, Tumblr anon messages, Discord threads??).
I get the idea behind framing it as a true-crime writer's unsavory account of what happened, but it's not well-executed—all of these different interviews, asides and novelizations take away from the actually very fascinating premise and trio of girls. It could have built up to some grand finale pulling all the pieces together, with a scathing point on social class divides and flower crown serial killer/true crime fandoms, but all that gets too lost in the end.
I get the idea behind framing it as a true-crime writer's unsavory account of what happened, but it's not well-executed—all of these different interviews, asides and novelizations take away from the actually very fascinating premise and trio of girls. It could have built up to some grand finale pulling all the pieces together, with a scathing point on social class divides and flower crown serial killer/true crime fandoms, but all that gets too lost in the end.
September 19, 2023
one of the things that’s fallen by the wayside in the last [gestures] years about fandom is that you weren’t fucking supposed to talk about it, for reasons that gestured to the vaguely ethical or legal (the fourth wall protects the sanctity of art!, remember what happened to harry potter lexicon) or to the social (people are gonna make fun of us or think we’re weird, which, let’s be real, we are) or to, frankly, the desire to cover for behavior and norms that were sketchy as hell. ethical quandaries around RPF, the sheer quantity of teenagers involved in what were and are (at the very mildest) sex-adjacent subcultures, the absolute, like—when I was sixteen a thirty-two-year-old woman said of my also-sixteen friend Dannie, after sending them abusive mail for twelve straight hours, “I don’t really think of it as human”. this happened because—you are probably going to laugh, roll your eyes, and say “of course”, and I am reflecting intensely on that probability—of something to do with Les Miserables.
toward the end of this book, a small online fandom finds out that one of their members has committed a horrific crime. their first response is to urge each other to tell no one, to protect their conversation from prying eyes, and to castigate the person who leaks the information. meanwhile, another member of their larger community works—with great diligence, ingenuity, and a sense of real glee—to obtain and preserve as much information as possible about the perpetrator, for the purpose of sharing it in a masterpost with the public. the victim of this book’s central crime is exposed, too, in the most literal and physical sense without a protective skin. the narrator’s daughter is called out online for a social crime, her identity and her family’s identity revealed without her consent; the social crime that justifies this is that her father unethically obtained information about other people. at my college, the anonymous administrator of a popular campus Facebook page was doxxed by a student journalist and his questionable Reddit posts exposed, causing immense controversy; I recall being surprised that my friend, a privacy activist, was so firmly on the side of the journalist, and he told me, “It’s all a cat-and-mouse game. The journalist was just doing her job, and she won, and he lost.” angry students then sent the student journalist sexual gore pictures.
much could be made of the unreliable narrator of this book, who (as we are informed on the first page, and on the last, and also several times in the middle) is an enormous liar who fabricates an unknown percentage of the story in it for his own benefit. but the book is not really less skeptical of telling the truth, or maybe just skeptical that, even if you have all the information in the world—especially if you have all the information in the world—the truth is distinguishable from what you want to see.
maybe the most difficult passage to read (for me, very subjective, a difficult book overall; however the deliberate fuzziness in-text over whether this event is out-of-text real builds to a spectacularly delivered forced-voyeurism nausea) is an extended, beat-by-beat description of a school shooting, which ends with a possible act of necrophilia. the fantasy, for the people obsessed with it, is not that something sexy happened with the corpse, the fantasy is that they can know factually what happened with the corpse, and then that they can understand emotionally what happened, and then that they *alone* can understand what happened. this book opens with the journalist asserting that, in a sea of bad podcasts, he is better-positioned to understand what happened—he is capable of understanding what happened. in fandom as in life, a fantasy of solipsism—he is you, and she is you, and an attack on him is an attack on not just you but the specialness that being him and knowing him grants you—a fantasy that the whole world is an endless mirror, and yourself at the center of it, scholar and savior, control absolutely and incomprehensibly complete. a couple of characters in this book read Terry Pratchett; in one of his books there’s a passage where a character is left alone in an endless wilderness. “You have perhaps heard the phrase that Hell is other people?” says another character to him. “In time, you will learn that it is wrong.” pocket hells no less.
all three murderers in this book have serious encounters with sexual predators; all three, when asked to speak about these encounters, respond with denials, avoidance, or silence. much is made in-book of the character of Violet, a born follower, being told repeatedly that she should have and could have stopped the crime or alerted the authorities, asking why she didn’t. the narrator points out her very good reasons for distrusting the authorities, hints at the criminals’ sense of distance and bewildered teenage realization that all of horror was something they actually really did; and I also think of the many exhortations I have seen, in very different contexts, not to “break the fourth wall”, for reasons that in the end I think can sometimes be summarized as: we need to be in control of us. why the hell didn’t I report that thirty-two-year-old woman? why the hell was my teenaged response to the many suicide threats I saw my friends make every month—not ever carried out, but always serious—just to tell them I loved them and draw them pictures and write them stories, why didn’t I tell anyone who could have gotten them IRL help? why the absolute hell was, and is, the response to harassment or predation or other bad behavior to write a callout post and organize a shunning, rather than to involve absolutely anybody from outside the community? why were the only two relationships we had to personal information as teenagers, the only relationships we were capable of having, strictly enforced mutual secrecy or gleeful forced voyeuristic exposure? why was it so unthinkable, even in the face of each other’s frighteningly naked confessions of serious hurt, that anybody else know? these were friends of mine, friends I cared deeply about and cried over. but they lived hundreds or thousands of miles away; but all I had of them was information. all we have of anybody, I guess, is information. what did my fifteen-year-old self see in that information? do teenagers see their friends, any more than they see their enemies, or do they love them because they see themselves? what do the adults here—journalists, teachers, parents, politicians—see in these kids except themselves? do they really think of them as human?
toward the end of this book, a small online fandom finds out that one of their members has committed a horrific crime. their first response is to urge each other to tell no one, to protect their conversation from prying eyes, and to castigate the person who leaks the information. meanwhile, another member of their larger community works—with great diligence, ingenuity, and a sense of real glee—to obtain and preserve as much information as possible about the perpetrator, for the purpose of sharing it in a masterpost with the public. the victim of this book’s central crime is exposed, too, in the most literal and physical sense without a protective skin. the narrator’s daughter is called out online for a social crime, her identity and her family’s identity revealed without her consent; the social crime that justifies this is that her father unethically obtained information about other people. at my college, the anonymous administrator of a popular campus Facebook page was doxxed by a student journalist and his questionable Reddit posts exposed, causing immense controversy; I recall being surprised that my friend, a privacy activist, was so firmly on the side of the journalist, and he told me, “It’s all a cat-and-mouse game. The journalist was just doing her job, and she won, and he lost.” angry students then sent the student journalist sexual gore pictures.
much could be made of the unreliable narrator of this book, who (as we are informed on the first page, and on the last, and also several times in the middle) is an enormous liar who fabricates an unknown percentage of the story in it for his own benefit. but the book is not really less skeptical of telling the truth, or maybe just skeptical that, even if you have all the information in the world—especially if you have all the information in the world—the truth is distinguishable from what you want to see.
maybe the most difficult passage to read (for me, very subjective, a difficult book overall; however the deliberate fuzziness in-text over whether this event is out-of-text real builds to a spectacularly delivered forced-voyeurism nausea) is an extended, beat-by-beat description of a school shooting, which ends with a possible act of necrophilia. the fantasy, for the people obsessed with it, is not that something sexy happened with the corpse, the fantasy is that they can know factually what happened with the corpse, and then that they can understand emotionally what happened, and then that they *alone* can understand what happened. this book opens with the journalist asserting that, in a sea of bad podcasts, he is better-positioned to understand what happened—he is capable of understanding what happened. in fandom as in life, a fantasy of solipsism—he is you, and she is you, and an attack on him is an attack on not just you but the specialness that being him and knowing him grants you—a fantasy that the whole world is an endless mirror, and yourself at the center of it, scholar and savior, control absolutely and incomprehensibly complete. a couple of characters in this book read Terry Pratchett; in one of his books there’s a passage where a character is left alone in an endless wilderness. “You have perhaps heard the phrase that Hell is other people?” says another character to him. “In time, you will learn that it is wrong.” pocket hells no less.
all three murderers in this book have serious encounters with sexual predators; all three, when asked to speak about these encounters, respond with denials, avoidance, or silence. much is made in-book of the character of Violet, a born follower, being told repeatedly that she should have and could have stopped the crime or alerted the authorities, asking why she didn’t. the narrator points out her very good reasons for distrusting the authorities, hints at the criminals’ sense of distance and bewildered teenage realization that all of horror was something they actually really did; and I also think of the many exhortations I have seen, in very different contexts, not to “break the fourth wall”, for reasons that in the end I think can sometimes be summarized as: we need to be in control of us. why the hell didn’t I report that thirty-two-year-old woman? why the hell was my teenaged response to the many suicide threats I saw my friends make every month—not ever carried out, but always serious—just to tell them I loved them and draw them pictures and write them stories, why didn’t I tell anyone who could have gotten them IRL help? why the absolute hell was, and is, the response to harassment or predation or other bad behavior to write a callout post and organize a shunning, rather than to involve absolutely anybody from outside the community? why were the only two relationships we had to personal information as teenagers, the only relationships we were capable of having, strictly enforced mutual secrecy or gleeful forced voyeuristic exposure? why was it so unthinkable, even in the face of each other’s frighteningly naked confessions of serious hurt, that anybody else know? these were friends of mine, friends I cared deeply about and cried over. but they lived hundreds or thousands of miles away; but all I had of them was information. all we have of anybody, I guess, is information. what did my fifteen-year-old self see in that information? do teenagers see their friends, any more than they see their enemies, or do they love them because they see themselves? what do the adults here—journalists, teachers, parents, politicians—see in these kids except themselves? do they really think of them as human?
January 2, 2024
My GOD THIS BOOK WAS SO AWFUL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m angry at it, just a whole massive novel of complete wasted potential. The only thing that kept me going was the v interesting premise: a satire on true crime with an unreliable narrator, but it pissed all of that away.
I started an iPhone notes list of ‘things I hate about this book’ about 50 pages in. I will discuss some of these things:
1. What the fuck is wrong with Faber and Faber’s editorial team???? This book had some of the worst editing I have EVER SEEN! Two totally missed instances of entire sentences being repeated in the same section, multiple grammar mistakes, massive ridiculous chunks of this book being completely completely unnecessary (why the fuck do we need to hear about mad bob for so long?????) to the point where the entire point of the book, the murder and the reveal of the unreliable narrator, was limited to about 50-100 pages at the end of a 430 page novel. And literally DO NOT TELL ME this book was supposed to be written by a bad author. I have said this before with Yellowface, why why why why why would anybody want to read a book that sucks on purpose?????? I don’t believe at all that these mistakes were just bc Carelli is supposed to be a hack, that is such a lazy excuse for bad writing.
2. Less damning point: but why are the teens in 2015/2016 supposed to be saying ‘Yass Queen! Slay! Serving traction alopecia realness!’ And ‘skinny legend’?? These girls were written as being my exact age, so I am well aware of the dumb shit I used to say when I was 15, and these phrases are stupidly and obviously modern. Idk not the end of the world but shouldn’t someone have pointed that out???
3. Inanely long section going through the details of the school shooter shippers tumblr fandom that includes a brief break in the novel to do a detailed play by play of a school shooting obviously inspired by TJ Lane ….. .. and an entire chunk of school shooter gay shipping fanfiction???? weird… and I didn’t like it… too long and I didn’t understand what we were meant to be taking from this apart from ‘Dolly is FUCKED UP!!!’
4. The ‘Guardian article’ at the end that is supposed to be the big reveal makes me feel like this author has never read a news article in her life. So unrealistically written. What Guardian article calls people ‘twitter main characters’? The ‘interview’ is so bizarre, and completely unbelievable.
5. Speaking of, the big reveal at the end that we literally know throughout the entire book is coming because it’s in the BLURB is such a let down… The way it’s stated makes it out like the whole content of this book might get called into question at some point, but the damp squib of an ending just tells us that Carelli over exaggerated some details (oh funnily enough it’s the meandering fiction/prose sections, who would have thought) and was gaining information immorally. Like.. ok? What does that even matter to us now?? And because it’s smacked at the end, it leaves us with no time to actually analyse what this means for the novel, there are no repercussions, no further thoughts, just: you have read an entire book. Chunks of it might not be true. End. I was expecting a massive amount more than that.. like obviously the bits that are supposedly untrue are where the author literally stops writing a non fiction analysis of a murder case and moves into teen drama fiction….? Right???? So there was just no suspense, no questioning, no discoveries at all in the entire reading process.
6. That Diamond guy was just Jimmy Saville. Not the end of the world but if so much else in this book is true, why not just call him Jimmy Saville? Was weird reading about a beloved northern BBC personality who was a charitable figure and therefore gained access to vulnerable children through the hospitals and care homes he donated to and proceeded to abuse them, and then have it not be Jimmy Saville, when there are multiple explorations of real life murder cases and world events.
7. I see ppl saying how this book is a great exploration into how dark and fucked up certain fandoms were on 2014ish tumblr. But I don’t know, I just didn’t find any of this compelling at all, and I was there!!! haha
I’m not sure why it didn’t hit, I think using a made up murder case to explore the ‘darkness’ of school shooter fandoms just falls a bit flat- because of what it is- it’s made up. Like am I meant to feel like ‘wow this COULD have happened… that’s so fucked up!!’
None of these girls felt like real people, and so the exploration into their ‘fandoms’ just felt flat and weird. I am somewhat familiar with what Clark was writing about, fandom-tumblr-shipping etc etc and it just felt a little off. It wasn’t something I really recognised as real. Like somebody who wasn’t there trying to act like they were. The language was off, the behaviours were off, everything was off.
8. This book has nothing to do with Brexit even thought it makes a big deal about being set at the time. Very surface level ‘UKIP is Bad’ stuff but nothing else. (UKIP is bad, obviously, but just thought there would be more discussion)
Anyway: I’ve found out through that weird publishing drama debacle that authors stalk their goodreads reviews and get upset about the bad ones so I feel weirdly paranoid that Eliza Clark will read this. Sorry Eliza. Sorry that I hated your book and threw it across the room after I was done. Sorry for writing a really long bad review about everything I didn’t like about it. :-S
(Woah I have just come back to this review after reading some other ones: I cannot believe how heavily this book took its case from the murder of Shanda Sharer. Makes any point it struggled to make about true crime totally irrelevant. What poor form. Seriously.)
I’m angry at it, just a whole massive novel of complete wasted potential. The only thing that kept me going was the v interesting premise: a satire on true crime with an unreliable narrator, but it pissed all of that away.
I started an iPhone notes list of ‘things I hate about this book’ about 50 pages in. I will discuss some of these things:
1. What the fuck is wrong with Faber and Faber’s editorial team???? This book had some of the worst editing I have EVER SEEN! Two totally missed instances of entire sentences being repeated in the same section, multiple grammar mistakes, massive ridiculous chunks of this book being completely completely unnecessary (why the fuck do we need to hear about mad bob for so long?????) to the point where the entire point of the book, the murder and the reveal of the unreliable narrator, was limited to about 50-100 pages at the end of a 430 page novel. And literally DO NOT TELL ME this book was supposed to be written by a bad author. I have said this before with Yellowface, why why why why why would anybody want to read a book that sucks on purpose?????? I don’t believe at all that these mistakes were just bc Carelli is supposed to be a hack, that is such a lazy excuse for bad writing.
2. Less damning point: but why are the teens in 2015/2016 supposed to be saying ‘Yass Queen! Slay! Serving traction alopecia realness!’ And ‘skinny legend’?? These girls were written as being my exact age, so I am well aware of the dumb shit I used to say when I was 15, and these phrases are stupidly and obviously modern. Idk not the end of the world but shouldn’t someone have pointed that out???
3. Inanely long section going through the details of the school shooter shippers tumblr fandom that includes a brief break in the novel to do a detailed play by play of a school shooting obviously inspired by TJ Lane ….. .. and an entire chunk of school shooter gay shipping fanfiction???? weird… and I didn’t like it… too long and I didn’t understand what we were meant to be taking from this apart from ‘Dolly is FUCKED UP!!!’
4. The ‘Guardian article’ at the end that is supposed to be the big reveal makes me feel like this author has never read a news article in her life. So unrealistically written. What Guardian article calls people ‘twitter main characters’? The ‘interview’ is so bizarre, and completely unbelievable.
5. Speaking of, the big reveal at the end that we literally know throughout the entire book is coming because it’s in the BLURB is such a let down… The way it’s stated makes it out like the whole content of this book might get called into question at some point, but the damp squib of an ending just tells us that Carelli over exaggerated some details (oh funnily enough it’s the meandering fiction/prose sections, who would have thought) and was gaining information immorally. Like.. ok? What does that even matter to us now?? And because it’s smacked at the end, it leaves us with no time to actually analyse what this means for the novel, there are no repercussions, no further thoughts, just: you have read an entire book. Chunks of it might not be true. End. I was expecting a massive amount more than that.. like obviously the bits that are supposedly untrue are where the author literally stops writing a non fiction analysis of a murder case and moves into teen drama fiction….? Right???? So there was just no suspense, no questioning, no discoveries at all in the entire reading process.
6. That Diamond guy was just Jimmy Saville. Not the end of the world but if so much else in this book is true, why not just call him Jimmy Saville? Was weird reading about a beloved northern BBC personality who was a charitable figure and therefore gained access to vulnerable children through the hospitals and care homes he donated to and proceeded to abuse them, and then have it not be Jimmy Saville, when there are multiple explorations of real life murder cases and world events.
7. I see ppl saying how this book is a great exploration into how dark and fucked up certain fandoms were on 2014ish tumblr. But I don’t know, I just didn’t find any of this compelling at all, and I was there!!! haha
I’m not sure why it didn’t hit, I think using a made up murder case to explore the ‘darkness’ of school shooter fandoms just falls a bit flat- because of what it is- it’s made up. Like am I meant to feel like ‘wow this COULD have happened… that’s so fucked up!!’
None of these girls felt like real people, and so the exploration into their ‘fandoms’ just felt flat and weird. I am somewhat familiar with what Clark was writing about, fandom-tumblr-shipping etc etc and it just felt a little off. It wasn’t something I really recognised as real. Like somebody who wasn’t there trying to act like they were. The language was off, the behaviours were off, everything was off.
8. This book has nothing to do with Brexit even thought it makes a big deal about being set at the time. Very surface level ‘UKIP is Bad’ stuff but nothing else. (UKIP is bad, obviously, but just thought there would be more discussion)
Anyway: I’ve found out through that weird publishing drama debacle that authors stalk their goodreads reviews and get upset about the bad ones so I feel weirdly paranoid that Eliza Clark will read this. Sorry Eliza. Sorry that I hated your book and threw it across the room after I was done. Sorry for writing a really long bad review about everything I didn’t like about it. :-S
(Woah I have just come back to this review after reading some other ones: I cannot believe how heavily this book took its case from the murder of Shanda Sharer. Makes any point it struggled to make about true crime totally irrelevant. What poor form. Seriously.)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 4,772 reviews