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Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival
by Justine van der Leun
A groundbreaking account of how the legal system punishes those it purports to protect, told through the stories of three unforgettable women.
When award-winning journalist Justine van der Leun began looking into the issue of criminalized survival, she was astonished to see how women were being imprisoned for protecting themselves against abuse. This sparked an intensive, yearslong investigation to determine how often survivors are targeted for prosecution, during which she collected more than a thousand personal accounts from women's prisons across America.
In Unreasonable Women, van der Leun tells the propulsive, shocking, and intimate stories of three extraordinary women who, finding themselves caught in the direst circumstances, had to kill to survive. Tanisha is a spirited Michigan mother determined to help authorities solve a cold case, whatever the consequences. Jema is a softhearted Missouri factory worker struggling to keep her family together while navigating a dangerous relationship. TC is a bold Californian trying to escape generations of trauma and a toxic family environment. In each case, a woman's childhood abuse was replicated in adulthood until they were ultimately forced to make an impossible choice.
A work of literary reportage that reads like the most dynamic crime novel, Unreasonable Women is the result of seven years of unprecedented research and on-the-ground reporting in U.S. prisons. It is the story of women and violence in America—and a wake-up call about a system that would rather condemn a woman to life behind bars than face its own failings. It is also the moving narrative of three women who find hope and humanity in the unlikeliest of places.
"Impeccably researched...Required reading for anyone who cares about women and justice, Unreasonable Women aims a powerful spotlight on our country's continued failure to protect its most vulnerable." —BookPage (starred review)
"Remarkable ... A devastating portrait ... A riveting, heartbreaking account of three women's experiences with violence and a system that perpetuates abuse." —Kirkus Reviews
"Sure to enrage and affect ... Embodying the increasingly rare role of journalist as relentless truth seeker, van der Leun embeds herself in these women's lives and combs through hundreds of hours of interviews and thousands of pages of legal documents to carefully tell their stories in piercing detail…This is true crime at its finest: when the racist patriarchal systems that replicate violence are at last exposed as the real monster." —Booklist
"Unreasonable Women is a rare and formidable work of narrative nonfiction. Grounded in years of exacting research and rigorous investigation, Justine van der Leun exposes a brutal truth: when women survive violence, the state often punishes them for it. With profound empathy and moral precision, she compels us to look beyond headlines and verdicts to the layered histories of abuse, poverty, silence, and disposability that precede a single violent act. As propulsive as any crime narrative but far more unsettling, the book situates these stories within a social and legal history that long normalized sexual coercion, absorbing men's violence into the ordinary fabric of life while casting women's resistance as deviance. The women here differ from others less in kind than in degree: in how far the violence went, and in their refusal to continue submitting to it. Van der Leun never turns away from pain, nor does she allow the reader to do so. This is essential journalism that fundamentally reshapes how we think about justice, survival, and the enduring peril of being a woman in America." —Brian Goldstone, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of There is No Place for Us
"What happens after a woman fights back and kills the man who's trying to kill her, after the credits roll? For most of them, it turns out, the answer is prison. Unreasonable Women takes us into the suffocating web of a system that punishes a victim for not mutely suffering the violence that is her birthright, for fighting back, and for not being a perfect victim: a dead one. Exquisitely written and utterly infuriating, this book is unputdownable." —Julia Ioffe, author of the National Book Award Finalist Motherland
This information about Unreasonable Women was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Justine van der Leun is a journalist and the author of several books, including We Are Not Such Things. She is also the host of the podcast Believe Her. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, Harper's Magazine, The New Republic, and The Guardian. She has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, and PEN America, among others. She lives in New York.
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