this is the final boss of unreliable narrators.

as someone who abhors true crime, i found reading this exploration of how evil it can be and who has the right to tell a story and what even constitutes "true" extremely satisfying.

and it does so brilliantly, through an unreliable crooked journalist narrator, through the lens of true-crime fandom, through clever workings of sympathy and fact.

i know it can be upsetting to explore our guilty pleasures, but i really recommend this to everyone who "indulges" in people's tragedies as entertainment. it's something that as a society we really must reckon with.

bottom line: a hard and worthy and clever read.

(thank you to the publisher for the e-arc)4-stars from-publisher-author literary-fiction ...more471 s5 comments elle321 12.8k

i loved boy parts and i love eliza clark, so it's not a surprise that this book was perfect for me.

such a dark and compelling narrative. clark packs so much into the book (which doesn't feel dense at all)—toxic internet culture, the dangers of true crime and the dangers of subjectivity in telling an objective story, and about girlhood as well. as someone who was deeply entrenched in the canals of 2010s tumblr, this was such an accurate representation.

full review to come.

thank you to harper for the arc!<3

???????

pre-read
i would voluntarily eat cement for this.2023 advanced-copies literary-fiction290 s1 comment Gabriella31 215

I’m definitely damaged from being on 2014 era tumblr, but these girls are objectively worse260 s Barry Pierce589 8,188

*kylie minogue voice* penance, penance, i hear it and i know21st-century read-in-2023174 s leah380 2,588

Although Clark’s second novel Penance takes quite a different approach to her first one (don’t go into this expecting Boy Parts 2.0), her debut gives enough of a hint that she knows how to make a novel this work.

Relayed by a journalist using witness accounts, interviews, news articles, podcast transcripts, tumblr posts, and correspondence, Penance tells the story of the shocking and gruesome murder among teenagers in a sleepy northern seaside town on the eve of the Brexit vote. Needless to say, the social and political context of the novel sets it up for a lot of interesting commentary, and Clark definitely delivers on this front. The setting of the northern seaside town, Crow-on-Sea, allows Clark to explore the decay of the north/seaside towns, and how dangerous the political and class divides of these towns can become when left to fester.

Alongside this, Penance also provides an unflinching and disturbing look at what has become the true-crime industrial complex, specifically in relation to internet fandom culture. Clark captures the pure malice and nastiness of 2010s internet culture in such a way that you simultaneously recoil in horror and laugh at how accurate it is. She is one of the few authors I’ve read who write about the internet in an authentic way, you can really tell she was in the trenches of Tumblr the rest of us.

In terms of internet culture, the novel explores how easily the online radicalisation of young, vulnerable people can occur, with fans in online fandom communities Tumblr feeding into each other’s obsession until everything starts to derail – and to what degree onlookers are complicit as they watch it all unfold in real time.

The characterisation is brilliant, specifically in terms of how Clark writes the teenage characters navigating the discomfort of adolescence and trying to forge a sense of self in a small, suffocating seaside town (relatable). She also perfectly, and horrifyingly, captures the cruelty of teenage female friendship groups and how awful teenagers can be to one another.

All in all, Penance is a compulsive and unsettling examination of the morality of true-crime and how true-crime cases are treated and discussed today, particularly in a post-truth world.

Thank you Faber & Faber for the advanced copy! Penance comes out in the UK on 6 July.


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this is gonna be a tough one for the chronically offline (aka normal people who didn’t have their teenage brains rotted by tumblr and the internet) to understand.arcs lit-fic own ...more176 s Lottie from book club234 602

1) incredible, 2) if you were a tumblr girlie in 2014 you will take psychic damage, and 3) many thanks to google's autofill function for reassuring me that i'm not the only person who thought the cherry creek massacre was realadvance-reading-copy read-in-2023140 s5 comments Yahaira453 154

The true crime was this book's lengthgranta-ybn-2023134 s2 comments Cortney - The Bookworm Myrtle Beach938 206

This book doesn't know what it wants to be... was it a fictionalized true crime novel? A story about teenage girls who communicate with spirits? A small town with the haves and have nots? A disgraced journalist trying to get his career back? The political ramifications of Brexit? A girl who is obsessed with teen mass murderers? True crime podcasters? Or just a group of mean girls who went too far?

None of it worked for me. I kept putting the book down and it got to the point where I had to write a post-it with everyone's names and who they were because I kept forgetting (or didn't care enough to try to remember).

Additionally, the author wrote as if the teenage girls were actually talking, whether to each other, the journalist, or over text/Tumblr. It got really annoying. If I had a drink every time the word "cringey" was used, I'd be drunk for the entire 2 weeks it took me to read this book.giveaways-arcs99 s6 comments Mimi169 102

I hate unreliable narrators!


Or do I?
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