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The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing
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About This Book
By the award-winning writer of Beautiful Thing, a masterly inquest into how the mysterious deaths of two teenage girls shone a light into the darkest corners of a nation. The girls' names were Padma and Lalli, but they were so inseparable that people in the village called them Padma Lalli. Sixteen-year-old Padma sparked and burned. Fourteen-year-old Lalli was an incorrigible romantic. They grew up in Katra Sadatganj, an eye-blink of a village in western Uttar Pradesh crammed into less than one square mile of land. It was out in the fields, in the middle of mango season, that the rumors started. Then one night in the summer of 2014 the girls went missing; and hours later they were found hanging in the orchard. Who they were, and what had happened to them, was already less important than what their disappearance meant to the people left behind. In the ensuing months, the investigation into their deaths would implode everything that their small community held to be true, and instigate a national conversation about sex and violence. Slipping deftly behind political maneuvering, caste systems and codes of honor in a village in northern India, The Good Girls returns to the scene of Padma and Lalli's short lives and shameful deaths, and dares to ask: what is the human cost of shame?
Reviews
"A modern-day Rashomon that offers multiple views of the widely publicized deaths of two young women in rural India.A gripping story that brings home the point that India may be 'the worst place in the world to be a woman.'"
"Faleiro's meticulous reconstruction moves far beyond the Katra events, dovetailing countless gruesome crimes, disclosing shocking data, divulging pervasive incompetence, and exposing widespread corruption."
"Through her, however, the reader comes to know the people involved ..."
"The need in the reader to understand these painfully premature deaths and make sense of the world, means that the real objective of The Good Girls – to turn and face the factual horror of inequality – is skilfully masked ..."
"a remarkable feat of reporting: What [Faleiro] finds reveals as much about the failings of India's law enforcement, media and politics as it does about the girls' deaths ..."
"In incisive prose, Faleiro, who offers no opinion on what actually happened, examines India's family honor system and the grueling lives of lower caste women."
"The story she weaves in exquisite language is as tragic and ugly as it is engrossing ..."
"In brisk chapters, some just a few pages long, with the sort of headings one associates with Victorian novels, we glide swiftly, smoothly, only to realize that we're not approaching a clearing but being led into a darker, more tangled story ..."
"The book paints a damning picture of non-existent police investigative capacity...also effectively captures the circus-like atmosphere that typically follows heinous crimes in India, where television media trials and political grandstanding replace the painstaking police work required to prepare for a criminal trial."
"The second 'revealed something more terrible still—that an Indian woman's first challenge was surviving her own home.'"
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