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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Sep 2023, 384 pages
Paperback:
Aug 6, 2024, 400 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Jillian Bell
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From the megabestselling author of Luckiest Girl Alive comes another shocking thriller inspired by the real-life sorority and target of America's first celebrity serial killer.
January 15, 1978, is a night of promise, excitement, and desire. A serial killer's murderous spree in the Pacific Northwest couldn't be further from the minds of the vibrant young women at the top sorority on Florida State University's campus in Tallahassee.
That night, Pamela Schumacher, president of the sorority, makes the unpopular decision to stay home. Startled awake at 3 a.m. by a strange sound, she makes the fateful decision to investigate. What she finds outside her bedroom door is a scene of implausible violence—two of her sisters dead; two others, maimed.
On the other side of the country, in Seattle, Tina Cannon has found peace after years of hardship. A chance encounter brings twenty-five-year-old Ruth Wachowsky into her life and they forge an instant connection. But then Ruth goes missing from Lake Sammamish State Park in broad daylight, the same day as another young woman, surrounded by thousands of beachgoers. Both vanish without a trace. Tina is convinced Ruth was a target of the man the papers refer to as the All-American Sex Killer.
When she learns of the massacre in Tallahassee, Tina is convinced it's him again. She rushes to Florida, on a collision course with Pamela—and one last impending tragedy.
Bright Young Women tells the story of two women from opposite sides of the country who forge a sisterhood in grief and in the fervent pursuit of justice. Toggling between those terrifying days in 1978 and a letter that brings them together in the present, this is a novel that flips the script on the oft-perpetuated glorification of a sadistic but ultimately average man and instead turns the spotlight on the exceptional women he targeted.
1.
PAMELA
Montclair, New Jersey
Day 15,825
You may not remember me, but I have never forgotten you, begins the letter written in the kind of cursive they don't teach in schools anymore. I read the sentence twice in stinging astonishment. It's been forty-three years since my brush with the man even the most reputable papers called the All-American Sex Killer, and my name has long since fallen to a footnote in the story.
I'd given the return address only a cursory glance before sliding a nail beneath the envelope's gummed seam, but now I hold it at arm's length and say the sender's name out loud, emphatically, as though I've been asked to answer the same question twice by someone who definitely heard me the first time. The letter writer is wrong. I have never forgotten her either, though she is welded to a memory that I've often wished I could.
"You say something, hon?" My secretary has moonwalked her rolling chair away from her desk, and now she sits framed by my open office door with a ...
This book is not an edge-of-your-seat slasher story. Those looking for a thriller to read with popcorn in hand will be disappointed. The crimes are viewed from the perspective of the victims and those close to them. Knoll never for a second lets us see them as anything less than dearly loved and fully human. The murders are not gripping. They are devastating. Pamela is present in the sorority house when her friend is killed, and witnesses the murderer running out the door. Her reactions are notably realistic. Knoll shows her as neither heroic nor cowardly, but as someone struggling to process what has just happened...continued
Full Review
(598 words)
(Reviewed by Jillian Bell).
Flynn Berry, New York Times bestselling author of Northern Spy and Under the Harrow
Blistering and powerful, Bright Young Women is an almost unbearably vivid story of sisterhood and survival. With razor-sharp skill, Jessica Knoll deconstructs the myth of a criminal mastermind, revealing the women he seeks to destroy as the truly brilliant ones. Laura Dave, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me
Bright Young Women is Jessica Knoll at her best—an unflinching and evocative novel about the tabloid fascination with evil and the dynamic and brilliant women who have the real stories to tell. Lisa Jewell, New York Times bestselling author of Then She Was Gone
Bright Young Women is a fearless and intoxicating ride into the aftershocks of a series of brutal murders. Knoll explores in vivid, pointillist prose the effects on the 'bright young women' of the title, both the victims snuffed out in their glorious prime, and those left behind in their wake. It's a compelling, almost hypnotic read and I loved it with a passion.Jessica Knoll's Bright Young Women, a fictionalized take on the crimes of Ted Bundy, portrays its Bundy-inspired killer as an unimpressive man sensationalized as a charming genius. This echoes real-life critiques of the way Bundy has been cast by the media and law enforcement over the years.
Bundy was one of the twentieth century's most notorious serial killers, carrying out a spree of crimes in the mid-to-late 1970s. He ultimately confessed to the murders of 28 women and girls and was executed in 1989 after being sentenced to death in two separate cases.
It could be argued that the media climate was poised to sensationalize Bundy's story from the start. His murder trial was the first in the United States to be nationally televised ...
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