Book Review: The Murder of Bindi Mackenzie

[osprey_archer]

The Year of Secret Assignments has a companion novel (actually, it has a number of them) called The Murder of Bindi Mackenzie (or The Betrayal of Bindi Mackenzie, outside of the US), which I got out of the library this afternoon and churned through.

There's this weird genre switch about four fifths of the way through the book. Like, until then it's a realistic fiction book, and then suddenly there are conspiracy theories and international crime organizations? I still have whiplash.

I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories in the first place, and in this case I'm extra put out because I feel that I've been cheated out of the conclusion of the story I was reading - the naturalistic story about bright, high-strung, socially inept Bindi Mackenzie's life reeling out of control. The sudden introduction of thriller elements cuts that story off, so we don't get to see Bindi come to terms with the fact that her dad actually kind of sucks, or stumble through making friends with her classmates - we see the beginning of her friendship with them but then it's artificially sped up by, you know, the MORTAL PERIL.

That being said, the first four-fifths of the book are brilliant. Bindi herself is a brilliantly realized character: certain of her superiority to her classmates but painfully aware of her social inferiority, extremely bright, terribly lonely, and socially inept both through ignorance and through malice. You can sympathize wholly with her classmates' hatred of her, and at the same time love her yourself.

And I probably identify with Bindi more than is strictly necessary. I kept recognizing snippets of her behavior so intensely that I had to put the book down and walk away. It's not so much that I, personally, am just like Bindi; more that my friend group in high school were a sort of corporate Bindi Mackenzie, except untouched by Bindi's sense of social inferiority (as there were nine of us) and therefore less cruel, if only because we could afford to ignore everyone else.

You know, I love many of my high school friends; but I don't think that group dynamic is actually very healthy. Is it bad that it took me four years of college, five hundred miles away from all of them, to figure that out?

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

It still strikes me as strange that we only have one life's worth of experiences (at least, for all intents and purposes), and so, at any given point along the way, things only happen one particular way. You don't get to do it over or to try out the what-if possibilities, and you don't get to change the starting parameters. So I found myself thinking, as I read your last two paragraphs, "What must it have been like to have been within a group of *nine* friends?" But I'll never know, and you'll never have the chance to find out how a different dynamic would have been different.

You must have gone to a large high school if nine of you could find each other and become a world unto yourselves, and yet still be, as a unit, outsiders.

About the book: that switch does sound bewildering! Seems like if that's the way the author wanted to make the story go, there should have been more hints of it earlier on--make it evident from the start that this is sort of a YA Grisham-type story, or whatever. But if it's set up as totally naturalistic, then yeah, to suddenly overlayer it with a conspiracy story and life-and-death situations really changes the dynamic in a jarring way.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I keep meaning to write a post about my high school friends, so at least that way you can get a taste of it by proxy. That's one of the points of telling stories, right, to try out those what-if possibilities.

It wasn't that large a high school - my graduating class had 176 students - but we were in a university town, so there was some hereditary geek factor there.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I read the entry you linked to below--thanks for that! It really helped me understand some stuff about my current group of friends, actually.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Actually, I've already written a post (http://osprey-archer.livejournal.com/72286.html) about my high school social group. Man, we were kind of weird.