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wordsofclover 's review for:
The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing
by Sonia Faleiro
I received this book from the publishers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
In 2014, two young girls from a village in Utar Pradesh were reported missing. Their bodies were later found hanging from a tree in a nearby orchard and their families refused to move them, proclaiming the girls raped and murdered.
In The Good Girls, Sonia Faleiro takes a look at the case of the girls she names Padma and Lalli and where everything went wrong with their case from the very start, from the moment they took too long to come back from the fields they used for their toilet. The book also acts as a lens into the way sexual assault is viewed in India, and how difficult it still is to fairly investigate and charge culprits for.
What I appreciated about this book is the real look it took into how girls are treated in India, and i particular the poorer villages and families in India. A girl's honor is everything - to the point that when it was deemed Padma and Lalli had most likely died by suicide, people thought to themselves, "well, how could they have LET themselves live" after certain aspects of the case and potential sexual relationships came to light.
"And so, just like that, in less than an hour since they were gone, Padma was no longer the quick-tempered one. Lalli was no longer the faithful partner in crime. Who they were, and what had happened to them, was already less important than what their disappearance meant to the status of the people left behind."
It also is such an eye-opener on how so many people still live today and it's heartbreaking. Truly. There were times I woudl forget these events only took place 6 years ago because the way people lived felt like decades, if not a century ago. The poverty, the lack of education, the stifling and control of young women (for example it's improper for a girl to talk on a mobile phone?!), was just so backward.
I don't think this book was structured as well as it could have been. It felt a bit all over the place for me at times but I do have to point out that the author was dealing with a lot of reports and information - of which there were a lot of contradictory statements (the main eyewitness changed his statement a number of times, and still doesn't really seem to know what he actually saw that night).
There's also a bit in here around the Indian caste system and some Indian politics which is just a minefield, even if you do know a bit about it. So that was something that left my brain feeling jumbled.
I'm honestly not 100% sure if I'd recommend it to everyone to read - I think some people will like and others will be turned off by how all over the place the story and the case is.
In 2014, two young girls from a village in Utar Pradesh were reported missing. Their bodies were later found hanging from a tree in a nearby orchard and their families refused to move them, proclaiming the girls raped and murdered.
In The Good Girls, Sonia Faleiro takes a look at the case of the girls she names Padma and Lalli and where everything went wrong with their case from the very start, from the moment they took too long to come back from the fields they used for their toilet. The book also acts as a lens into the way sexual assault is viewed in India, and how difficult it still is to fairly investigate and charge culprits for.
What I appreciated about this book is the real look it took into how girls are treated in India, and i particular the poorer villages and families in India. A girl's honor is everything - to the point that when it was deemed Padma and Lalli had most likely died by suicide, people thought to themselves, "well, how could they have LET themselves live" after certain aspects of the case and potential sexual relationships came to light.
"And so, just like that, in less than an hour since they were gone, Padma was no longer the quick-tempered one. Lalli was no longer the faithful partner in crime. Who they were, and what had happened to them, was already less important than what their disappearance meant to the status of the people left behind."
It also is such an eye-opener on how so many people still live today and it's heartbreaking. Truly. There were times I woudl forget these events only took place 6 years ago because the way people lived felt like decades, if not a century ago. The poverty, the lack of education, the stifling and control of young women (for example it's improper for a girl to talk on a mobile phone?!), was just so backward.
I don't think this book was structured as well as it could have been. It felt a bit all over the place for me at times but I do have to point out that the author was dealing with a lot of reports and information - of which there were a lot of contradictory statements (the main eyewitness changed his statement a number of times, and still doesn't really seem to know what he actually saw that night).
There's also a bit in here around the Indian caste system and some Indian politics which is just a minefield, even if you do know a bit about it. So that was something that left my brain feeling jumbled.
I'm honestly not 100% sure if I'd recommend it to everyone to read - I think some people will like and others will be turned off by how all over the place the story and the case is.