The novel draws from two tragic events during Hall's own time as a reporter in Texas and Chicago - deaths that haunted her for decades. Though Jordan's musings sometimes slow the action, Hall's story makes up in verisimilitude and insight what it lacks in pacing. Shawn Taylor, is told in the first person, so we're seeing the situation unfold through a reporter's eyes and we're privy to every thought in Jordan's kinetic mind as she probes deeper than the police and forces attention to a story few others take seriously.īook Reviews New Thriller Challenges Readers To Take Another Look At 'These Women' She's determined that this time will be different.Īs this ambitious Black journalist explores what happened to young Masey James, it becomes clear to her - if not to others, who are quick to point a finger at Black boys - that Masey's disappearance may be part of a larger, sinister pattern. Yet when a thriving 15-year-old Black girl who's the pride of her family vanishes in Chicago and the police are eager to dismiss the event as just another "case of a potential runaway," the explanation does not sit well with intrepid local TV reporter Jordan Manning.
Unlike the media frenzy that ensues when middle-class white women like Gabby Petito go missing, Black girls often disappear without fanfare. But the novel's storyline proves perfectly tailored to Hall's experience and skill set. That's an ambitious agenda, and fiction is a distinctly different mode of storytelling from news reporting, even if taking big issues and making them personal is second nature for the Emmy Award-winner. Though its subject may sound familiar, journalist and talk-show host Tamron Hall's debut novel As the Wicked Watch is a singular thriller that brings the vulnerability and systemic neglect of Black girls as victims of violent crime into vivid relief.
0 kommentar(er)
