Penance is a fictional true crime story, about a 2016 case in which three teenage girls tortured and burned a classmate. It purports to be the republication of a book that was pulled when the journalist was accused of misrepresenting the statements of the participants.
The theme of Penance –– and of the fictional book at its center –– is that our cultural obsession with true-crime stories derives from an unhealthy identification with criminals that leads to further violence. The perpetrators suffer from the usual pressures of being a teenage girl, and their exposure to true-crime fandom provides an unhealthy outlet for relieving the pressure, and they end up being consumed by it. It's not unlike the stories one hears about people getting radicalized through online communities.
One of the reviews excerpted on the back cover credits the author as "a genius with voice," but that was not my experience. Each girl gains a distinctive personality but they share an identical way of expressing themself. The fictional journalist author is presented as a hack and the prose supports that characterization. My biggest problem with Penance was that its style and organization felt nothing like an actually published book; rather, it seemed like a collection of materials that might be massaged into a book.
I expected Penance to investigate the ethics of the true-crime genre and of literary embellishment from the bare facts. These questions do come up in the author interview that make up the final 10 pages, but they are merely raised and not examined.
Clark –– the actual author –– convincingly creates a milieu in which the girls adapt their personae to their peers amid ever-shifting alliances. Her treatment of the class structure of Crow-on-Sea is less nuanced. We learn more details about the crime as we go along, but nothing that truly deepens our understanding.
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