Review by Booklist Review
Blake was in law school when she got a call informing her that her 16-year-old cousin, Scott, had brutally murdered a 9-year-old boy, a stranger, on a bike path one fateful summer day. Scott's psychotic break and its violent fallout changed everything about how Blake interprets crime, punishment, and mental illness. Blake grew skeptical of the theatrics of law school: the clear-cut answers and obvious rights and wrongs seemed so silly when the real world was so full of confounding heartbreak. Scott's crime and subsequent sentence of life in prison at Angola left Blake with so many questions about evil, disease, inherited trauma, and the emptiness of legal justice. This book explores every facet of those inquiries, meandering through grief and entropy, always searching for nuance and finding more questions. Blake is a keen researcher and sharp in her academic assessment of how the criminal justice system handles the young, but it's her ability to blend that report into a shockingly poignant memoir that makes this book a must-read.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Vermont Law School professor Blake debuts with an intimate and deeply moving meditation on trauma, healing, hope, and the criminal justice system. In 2010, Blake's 16-year-old cousin Scott had a psychotic break and killed a nine-year-old boy in Louisiana; he was eventually sentenced to life in prison without parole. Blake, who had just completed her first year of law school at the time of the murder, grapples with the limited capacity of the legal system to remedy broken lives, and investigates heartbreak in its myriad forms, including grief at the loss of a loved one and the violence, abuse, and addiction present on both sides of her family. She also documents how her cousin's legal situation shaped her own educational and career path, including a stint teaching English at San Quentin prison, and theorizes that acts of creation help people to make sense of grief. Distinguishing between justice and fairness, Blake contends that sentencing juvenile offenders to life without parole, even in cases of "irreparable corruption," discounts the human potential for change, and posits that mercy has the power to break cycles of suffering. Crystalline prose, incisive inquiries into complex moral and legal matters, and candid reflections on the pain of losing hope make this a must-read. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A meditation on crime, punishment, and heartache. Blake began her legal career working for the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. The work was depressing, and after Sandy Hook and the subsequent defeat of gun-control measures in Congress, she "lost hope." A couple of years earlier, a 16-year-old cousin of hers suffered a psychotic episode and savagely killed a young boy, a horrific act that received little publicity because of the explosion of the BP Deepwater Horizon. "When the worst happens, the notion of luck takes on strange significance. What's lucky when your son murders another mother's son? That there is oil spilling into the ocean," she writes. The best part of Blake's book explores the trajectory of the crime, subsequent trial, and imprisonment of her cousin, who has been spending his life behind bars incessantly reading and teaching Bible classes while wrestling with his crime. Meaningfully, after reading Crime and Punishment, he described his crime by saying that he "took Ryan's choices away." Were the memoir to stick to this story, it would have been more effective, for much of it is given over to hit-or-miss meditations on heartbreak, lost love, and the like, with references to and quotations from a canon ranging from Ice Age cave paintings to the socially conscious journalism of Rebecca Solnit. Sometimes these musings are weighty ("Complicated grief is complicated because it doesn't change shape or size; it stays unlivable"), sometimes mere soufflés: "Heartbreak's popularity in times of great taking reveals the essence of a broken heart--what it is to have and then not have." One wishes the author had directed her energies to the crime and how it played out; in those sections, her writing shines. A mixed bag of longueurs and profundities that should prove useful to students of the judicial system. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
