My main problem with Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know is the guilt I felt after I finished reading. I think it begins with Lippman's decision to write Sunny as a whiny, self-centered, narcissistic baby. (Harsh, I know.) Because Sunny is such a despicable character, I as the reader wanted to place blame on her at the end of the novel, once we find out that she did, in fact, lead Heather into a dangerous situation. While I do not think she is in any way responsible for Heather's death, I believe that at 15, Sunny was old enough to know better than to take Heather to the hotel.
This is where the guilt begins--how could I possibly want to put blame on someone who went through physical and sexual abuse by the same man who killed her sister? I believe that this is where Lippman fails. Had she written a character that readers could empathize with and would enjoy reading about, we would not want to put any sort of blame on Sunny.
I also believe that the novel was way too long and complex--too many chapters, characters, and dead ends, so that by the time we were finally told what happened, it was easy to point fingers at the nearly 40-year-old woman who still acted as though she were 15.
So what if the main point was to make you feel guilty? I continue to have a weird feeling that L. led the reader on the wild goose chase, so to speak, in order to interrogate the reader's assumptions about abuse, crimes against children, and the weird prurient interest that media, in general, has with such things.
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