I Have Some Questions for You

I love books that don’t fit neatly into any one box. Rebecca Makkai’s latest, I Have Some Questions for You, is the perfect example of this. Part prep school takedown, part mystery, part personal reckoning, this novel has a strong emotional throughline paired with a gripping plot that keeps the pages turning.

Decades after graduating from her elite New England boarding school, Bodie Kane is invited back to campus to teach a class. Now in her 40s and successful in her own right, Bodie still has complicated feelings about her adolescence. The catty comments and thinly veiled racism were hard enough to stomach, but the Granby School had an even darker undercurrent that still haunts its halls: the murder of a young girl. A man was convicted back in 1995, shortly after Thalia’s death, but the more time Bodie spends at the scene of the crime, the more she becomes convinced this story is not as simple as it appears.

I am a sucker for boarding school novels—the idyllic, tree-lined settings, the toxic female friendships, the first loves and losses heightened by surging hormones. Rebecca Makkai has taken this much-adored trope to the next level, into something bigger and darker and more profound. This is a book about time—how it heals wounds, how it offers insights, how it fundamentally changes us. And this book will change you, too.

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.

But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.