*Contains Mild Spoilers*

I didn’t know this was a fictional novel when I picked it up, then started reading it. And it was fiction, but maybe not so much… weaving truth into the fictional tale made it very real. And the story wasn’t about the dead girl as much as it was all the girls, dead or alive, carrying the scars and burdens of abuse and use and mistreatment, about the men who pay for the crimes of others because of the colour of their skin and being in the wrong place at the convenient time, about justice and injustice and finding love. It felt investigative, thorough, but we lost some perspective and gained other tidbits when the witness we were following was sequestered. The end is...well, it is as it is. All the strings are loose and many are left undone. Justice is sidelined. Endings are ambiguous and messy. As in life. 

But the worst part is that voices are silenced or ignored. And if we keep on like this, as the message resounds, how can we progress? We leave in our wake the damaged humanity of the unjust past, piling up the offences in every new generation.

I appreciated the middle-aged author’s view of this new younger generation: a group of youth willing to accept one another for who they are and who they are becoming, open to weird and wild and loving both without the boundaries of social norms dictating standards and social circles. Though she admitted a certain amount of obliviousness to their inner workings and relationship dynamics, she portrayed the next generation with an open heart and mind to hope.