A relevant true-crime cautionary tale as well as an urgent plea for mental health awareness.
An unsettling chronicle of the “Slenderman” stabbing and its subsequent courtroom debacle.
In 2014, two 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin, planned the murder of their friend. They believed her death would appease Slenderman, a fictional character popularized by the website Creepypasta, an aggregator of user-submitted ghost stories. On May 31, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser lured Payton Leutner into the woods and stabbed her 19 times. The girls left her for dead, although miraculously, Leutner survived. Quickly apprehended, Weier and Geyser entered the inconceivably slow stream of Wisconsin’s criminal justice system. Hale breathlessly recounts this unspeakable tragedy but holds her focus on the courtroom and society’s failures in treating the mentally ill. Her message is resonant: We must do better for those in need. However, Leutner’s trauma often feels sidelined while Hale tries to promote awareness and dismantle the stigmas surrounding mental illness. Much of the book is Geyser’s story. She was dealing with schizophrenia with little understanding that her illness was something treatable. “They said I was trying to get attention,” she explained years after the incident. Her parents were in denial, and her “teachers had neither the time nor the training” to be supportive. Complicating things further, Wisconsin law allows children to be tried as adults in certain circumstances, a legal gray area that stuck Weier and Geyser in a dangerous three-year limbo between jail and a mental health institute before their judgment. The power of online media remains chillingly present throughout the narrative. During a “livestream of the trial on Facebook,” Hale writes, “internet commenters were offering their opinion of [Geyser’s] character,” some even calling her an “evil creature” that should be killed. Beyond the horrific incident at its center, the book expands into a searing criticism of how society treats (and mistreats) the mentally ill.
A relevant true-crime cautionary tale as well as an urgent plea for mental health awareness.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5980-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Remarkable bravery fluently recounted.
The ably reconstructed story of the author’s convoluted escape from North Korea, detailing the hardships of life there and the serendipity of flight.
A supremely determined young woman, Lee chronicles her life in North Korea and her defection in her late teens in 1998. With the assistance of co-author John, she re-creates a picaresque tale of incredible, suspenseful, and truly death-defying adventures, which eventually led her to asylum in South Korea and then America. The author grew up largely in the northeast province of Ryanggang, bordering the Yalu River with China, and her family home was in Hyesan. Her father was a privileged member of the military, and her enterprising mother was a successful trader on the black market. The family, including younger brother Min-ho, did not endure the hardships of famine like people of low songbun, or caste, but the author learned that her father was not her biological father only shortly before he died by suicide after being trailed by security, beaten, and imprisoned in her mid-teens. Her mother had previously married and divorced another man. At age 17, the lights of China, directly across the river, beckoned, and the author managed to cross and establish contact first with a trading partner of her mother’s, then dissident relatives of her father’s in Shenyang. While the author had no intention of leaving her mother, it was apparent that it was too dangerous for her to return. Her relatives shielded her for a few years, trying to arrange a marriage with a wealthy Korean-Chinese man, from whom the author fled at the eleventh hour. Working as a waitress in Shanghai afforded some invisibility, though she was always susceptible to con men and security police. As the narrative progresses, the author’s trials grow ever more astounding, especially as she eventually tried to get her mother and brother out of North Korea.
Remarkable bravery fluently recounted.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-00-755483-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper360
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.
A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.
If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for “Jeff.” Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone—maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence—should have done something. “To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room,” writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer’s behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents’ troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother’s decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. “It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent,” writes Backderf. “Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends.”
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0216-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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