Bright Young Women
Publisher: Macmillan
Pub Date: 28 September 2023
Genre: Historical Crime Fiction
Panda Rating:
(5 pandas)
📖 SYNOPSIS
An extraordinary novel inspired by the real-life sorority targeted by America’s first celebrity serial killer in his final murderous spree.
January 1978. A serial killer has terrorized women across the Pacific Northwest, but his existence couldn’t be further from the minds of the vibrant young women at the top sorority on Florida State University’s campus in Tallahassee. Tonight is a night of promise, excitement, and desire, but Pamela Schumacher, president of the sorority, makes the unpopular decision to stay home—a decision that unwittingly saves her life. Startled awake at 3 a.m. by a strange sound, she makes the fateful decision to investigate. What she finds behind the door is a scene of implausible violence—two of her sisters dead; two others, maimed. Over the next few days, Pamela is thrust into a terrifying mystery inspired by the crime that’s captivated public interest for more than four decades.
On the other side of the country, Tina Cannon has found peace in Seattle after years of hardship. A chance encounter brings twenty-five-year-old Ruth Wachowsky into her life, a young woman with painful secrets of her own, and the two form an instant connection. When Ruth goes missing from Lake Sammamish State Park in broad daylight, surrounded by thousands of beachgoers on a beautiful summer day, Tina devotes herself to finding out what happened to her. When she hears about the tragedy in Tallahassee, she knows it’s the man the papers refer to as the All-American Sex Killer. Determined to make him answer for what he did to Ruth, she travels to Florida on a collision course with Pamela—and one last impending tragedy.
Bright Young Women is the story about two women from opposite sides of the country who become sisters in their fervent pursuit of the truth. It proposes a new narrative inspired by evidence that’s been glossed over for decades in favor of more salable headlines—that the so-called brilliant and charismatic serial killer from Seattle was far more average than the countless books, movies, and primetime specials have led us to believe, and that it was the women whose lives he cut short who were the exceptional ones.
⚠️ CONTENT/TRIGGER WARNINGS
Rape, sexual assault, sexual partner violence, murder, kidnapping, misogyny, forced institutionalisation/corrective therapy for being queer (lesbian) recounted, lesbophobia, paedophilia and grooming recounted, depictions of grief
This review was originally posted on Goodreads on 7 November 2024.
TL;DR: I just finished this book and I’m still feeling heated by it. Anything I say right now probably won’t make much sense since I’m so *emotional* because this book made me SO MAD! I’m mad at the media, at police incompetency, at how society treats women, at how men are given passes and chances and leniency because “they have bright futures, have so much potential and blah blah bs”, and at how pointedly this book shows that after all these years, while so much is different so little has changed. Bright Young Women was just utterly heartbreaking.
I buddy read this book with Becky and it was the best decision because we needed someone to vent to while reading this. We got more emotional and angry the further we read but this also ended up surprising us and has ended up on both our last of 2024 favourites.
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