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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
"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 ..."
"Her social analysis is enlightening, but Faleiro's book is most poignant when it's focused on the girls' unfinished lives."
"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.'"
"Through her, however, the reader comes to know the people involved ..."
"Taut with dramatic tension, The Good Girls vividly captures the sights, sounds, smells, preoccupations and oppressiveness of the village ..."
"These contextual extras, while unarguably urgent, prove excessive, eventually overwhelming the girls' tragedy."
"This is the force, above all others, that stunted the girls' lives and hastened their deaths."
"The second 'revealed something more terrible still—that an Indian woman's first challenge was surviving her own home.'"
"She indicts something even more common, and in its own way far more pernicious: a culture of indifference that allowed for the neglect of the girls in life and in death."
"The Good Girls is excellent, deeply felt nonfiction."
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