by Jessica Knoll ★★★★☆
Bright Young Women made it on to my reading radar when it finished 18th on Amazon's "Best Books of 2023" list. That, plus the subject, was enough to get me to devote some valuable reading time to it.
The novel is a retelling / reimagining of the crimes of Ted Bundy, who is intentionally referred to only as "The Defendant" in the novel. It opens with his 1978 attack on the Florida State sorority house that left two young women dead and two permanently injured. The president of the sorority, a composite character cast as "Pamela Schumacher", was the only eyewitness to assailant. What follows is Pamela's path to dealing with the attack and helping to bring Bundy to justice.
As part of that journey, Pamela meets Martina "Tina" Cannon, the girlfriend of a young woman named "Ruth" who went missing in Seattle in 1974 around the same time that Bundy was suspected of another abduction in that area. Ruth's body was never located, and when Tina hears about the horrific crimes in Florida, she travels there, certain that the same man who absconded with Ruth was responsible for the attacks at the sorority. She connects with Pamela, and they begin to work together to bring Bundy to justice.
Author Jessica Knoll takes some small liberties with the documented facts of Bundy's crimes and creates some composite characters in Pamela and Ruth (and, as far as I know, an entirely fictional character in the form of Tina), but she mostly adheres to history. The primary point of the novel, though, is to shine a light on the victims and the women, rather than the continued attention given to "The Defendant", most recently through television media that has Bundy back in the spotlight for a whole new generation. Both the Netflix docuseries “Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes”, and the movie “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” have received backlash for their sympathetic portrayal of Bundy and lack of attention paid to his victims. Layer on a number of books and documentaries about the Golden State Killer, and we seem to be in the midst of a media cycle focused on the "golden era of the American serial killer", as Knoll puts it. Knoll's primary purpose in writing the novel is to refocus the spotlight on the people who matter, rather than the monsters who don't, and she does so in an effective and entertaining way.
While it's hard to build tension in a novel based on well-documented historical facts from 50 years ago, Knoll still manages to do so (especially for someone like me who was unfamiliar with the details of those cases), and she creates characters, backstories and relationships that make for an engaging read. The novel bounces between differing points of view, from Pamela in 1978, Pamela in 2021, and Ruth in 1974. I appreciated the different viewpoints as a way for the reader to get to know and connect with Ruth, but it's a device that would have worked better had Pamela's and Ruth's voices not been nearly identical. I found myself starting a new chapter and, if I hadn't paid close enough attention to the chapter heading, having to scroll back up to confirm the character and year in which it was taking place.
In addition to refocusing the attention on the victims, the novel also highlights the misogyny and male-female double standards that were particularly present in the 1970s, and rakes the media, police, and judge over the coals for the way they buddied up to Bundy. Knoll had several axes to grind, and I think she's mostly successful in achieving her desired end result by minimizing the focus on a horrendous human being and bringing attention to those whose lives were forever changed. Some of the irony is that while the events mirror history, this is a fictionalized account; none of the actual victims' names appear in the book (besides Caryn Campbell, I think). So while Knoll rails against the undue focus given to Bundy, she obfuscates the focus she tries to bring to the women by removing their names and creating composite characters from their shared experiences. Given her command of the events she fictionalizes, in some ways I wish she would have written a non-fiction account of those actual "bright young women" -- that would have more truly achieved her goal of placing the attention where it belongs.
Bright Young Women falls shy of a 5-star rating for me, but it's a solid, better-than-average book centered on a series of events I knew little about. If you don't know much about Ted Bundy's killing spree between 1974 and 1978, I'd intentionally keep yourself in the dark before reading the book. Go in blind, enjoy the novel for what it is, and then read up on the actual events afterward. Doing so will give you an appreciation for how Knoll blended history with fiction, how she stayed true to the primary components of the story, but how she ultimately found creative ways to tell the women's stories (even if they were fictionalized) rather than focusing on the killer.