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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
"transfixing; it has the pacing and mood of a whodunit, but no clear reveal; Faleiro does not indict the cruelty or malice of any individual, nor any particular system."
"This is the force, above all others, that stunted the girls' lives and hastened their deaths."
"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."
"Her social analysis is enlightening, but Faleiro's book is most poignant when it's focused on the girls' unfinished lives."
"shocking, mesmerising ..."
"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."
"Faleiro compares the Delhi bus rape with the tale of the two hanged girls."
"It brings us close to these people and their problems and heartaches and, in so doing, makes us examine our own."
"The Good Girls is a puzzle with a surprise at the end."
"The Good Girls is excellent, deeply felt nonfiction."
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