I have a habit of loading interesting-sounding books onto my e-reader and then promptly forgetting about them. This ensures that I am not only limited to a never-ending physical TBR pile, but an unending digital trove as well. Full disclosure, I opened Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women, released September 19th of last year, because, at that moment, the title and the cover caught my attention. Friends, I was not prepared.
It is the late 1970s and Pamela Schumacher is an American success story in the making. President of her sorority, which admits only the most intelligent young ladies on campus, her path is laid out and clear of obstacles. One night, Pamela is witness to the immediate aftermath of a murder and, naturally, everything changes.
For the whole of the book, Pamela speaks of the murderer with such venom, yet she never once names him. You see, not only is Bright Young Women the story of an actual, real-life serial killer (laid out in the book’s synopsis, which I failed to review before reading this book), it also seeks to subvert the continued glamorization of these real-world monsters. This man’s name has been uttered enough, yet how many can name his victims? He is (in)famous, with celebrity status, even decades after his crimes and his death, while his victims go largely forgotten. Listen, Oliver Stone tried to make the same point with the 1994 film Natural Born Killers, but we were too thick to get it then. Jessica Knoll follows a different path than Stone, giving us 384 pages of humanity attempting to trump headlines and there is no missing the point.
Knoll changes the names and details of some, but not all, of the victims as well as some other information here and there, a decision that bothered me. I would have preferred it if she chose one or the other and remained consistent. The inconsistency is an insult to those who went through these horrors, yet this book purports to champion those same victims. Everything else in the story is a ripped-from-the-headlines fact, cobbled into a legitimate page-turner. Knoll’s writing brings you right to the seventies through character dialogue and descriptive scene-setting. She pulls this off without needing to hit you over the head with hot pants or an ABBA album.
True crime fans will like Bright Young Women for all the Easter eggs in the narrative, perhaps mentally parsing fact from fiction. Fiction fans will enjoy the unfolding of the well-told story, though they may have some trouble if they are empathic or tend to be more sensitive. (I knew how it would end, yet it was infuriating and heartbreaking all the same.) Despite the potential emotional toll, Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women is an engaging read.
