How She Died, How I Lived by Mary Crockett (review)

Kyle sent targeted texts to five girls, asking each to meet him in a field outside of town. Only Jamie went, and he brutally raped and murdered her. A year later, the unnamed narrator, one of the four girls who didn't respond, is struggling with survivor guilt, intensified by her belief that Jamie was the kinder person and thus more deserving of survival. What's worse, she's finding herself attracted to Jamie's boyfriend, Charlie, and he to her. The narrator is by turns insightful, angry, and profoundly sad, but it is her anger that buoys her at first, enabling her to approach situations of casual sexism with a sardonic wit and a quick retort while using more forceful means to protect herself against predatory high school boys. As she turns things over in her mind and encounters other people affected by the crime, including Jamie's mother, she realizes that only forgiveness can give her the agency she's lost in coming so close to being a victim. The narrative voice is highly credible as it canvasses the fluctuating range of emotional highs and lows, the sine curve of fear and empowerment, and the fully realized ethical dilemmas that follow a trauma that hits far too close to home. KC