Not-So 'Bright Young Women'

I recently read Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll for a book club I'm in. I didn't know what it was about. I went in completely blind. To give a quick overview, this book takes the crims of Ted Bundy and fictionalizes them and the aftermath.

Overview

The book as three timeline/POVs. Two of the timelines follow Pamela, who in this alternate universe is the young woman in the sorority who saw Bundy leaving The House. In the first timeline in the 70's, Pamela initially sees the killer and thinks he is her best friend's on-and-off boyfriend. After just a second or two she recognizes that it is not him and sees that she has never seen the man before. She tells the police the truth about her initial instinct. However, instead of listening to her change as soon as she saw his face, the sherriff decides that it must be the ex-boyfriend (partly because the best friend was one of the victims who died). No matter how many times Pamela tells him that the guy was not Roger, he refuses to look at anyone else.

Another POV is Ruth, who was killed by Bundy in Washington state a few years before the sorority attack. Her timeline has little to do with Bundy. It shows her dealing with the grief of losing her father and coming to terms with herself being gay. She also enters into a relationship with a woman named Tina who later shows up in Pamela's timeline trying to track Bundy down and figure out why he was able to escape from Colorado.

Pamela's second timeline is modern day. She receives a letter from someone and says that the man who wants her dead is still alive. In this timeline she is going back to Florida to find out whatever the secret is that we have to find out.

What's Wrong - The Book (Spoilers from this point on)

First, I will say that the 3 POVs all sound the same. Pamela is from New York and in the modern timeline she is a lawyer who owns her own firm in New York. In her college timeline she is living in Florida and has been for the previous four years. Ruth is from Washington state. Yet the words they use and vernacular is the same across all three women. I found myself having to go back pay close attention to the chapter headings so I would know who was talking in that chapter.

There was also almost a complete disconnect between the three storylines. There was not some bit of evidence of Ruth's storyline that greatly informed either of Pamela's. Ruth's storyline is there to explain Tina's actions in Pamelas 70's storyline and also to explain the modern storyline. But it felt like there was too much that trying to be fit in with three storylines when Ruth's storyline could have been woven in with Tina's explanations instead of trying to use a different POV. Truly all we needed to know about Ruth's death is that she was meeting Tina and no one was connecting her to Bundy, yet it takes up almost a third of the page count of the book.

For a book that is pushing how strong women are, Pamela is a very meek character. I'm sure part of that is to illustrate Pamela deciding to push back against what her boyfriend wants, but in the story her boyfriend is literally the only person expecting her to follow him to an inferior law school when she was accepted to Columbia. Her parents and her friends all want her to go to Columbia. When what she values about the sorority she's in is the connection with other young women who are focused on their careers after school, it just seems odd that she would be so willing to follow her boyfriend around. A boyfriend she only has so that it is one less social obligation she has to think about.

Finally, the thing that kicks of the book is modern-day Pamela getting a letter that starts with the person saying she may not remember them but they remember her and Pamela says she has to rush to Florida. She ends the section by saying that the man who wants her dead is still alive. There is a sense of urgency and tension wondering what direction we're going. Turns out it's a cheap trick. No one actually wants her dead. There is a journalist who betrayed her for fame who now has dementia and in his worst moments believes she is trying to kill him and therefore wants her dead first. He is in an institution and is not a danger to her. And nothing Pamela finds out changes anything about the Bundy case as is implied. Instead, it is information about where Ruth's body is. I'm not saying that finding the body isn't important, but the way Knoll went about it was a cheap and lazy way to create tension that didn't have a satisfactory pay off.

What's Wrong - The Case

A bigger issue I have with the book is what Knoll gets wrong about the Ted Bundy case. I fully understand that this is an alternate universe story. None of the victims names are the same as Bundy's actual victims (other than Kimberly Leach, his final victim, and I'm not sure why that's the case). However, they each have direct comparisons to his actual victims. It is not unreasonable for people who have not watched/read every source they can get on the Bundy case to think that she is bringing in actual issues that happened in the various investigations across jurisdictions.

But she doesn't. She portrays all law enforcement (particularly in Colorado and Florida) as being either incompetent or corupt. Bundy did escape from Colorado custody twice. However, that is not because the cops were completely ill-equiped to handle him. And it wasn't because they were corrupt and just not giving the security they needed to.

The police in Florida are shown refusing to believe that Bundy is connected to the sorority case. In the book Pamela thinks, for a split second, that the person she sees running to the front door of The House is the on-and-off boyfriend of her best friend, Roger. The police latch onto that and focus on him instead of listening to her say that once she saw the man's face she knew it wasn't Roger. She spends the majority of her 70's storyline trying to convince the police that she didn't see Roger that night. In the real case Bundy was a top suspect pretty quickly. The young woman who identified him was consistent about who she said it was and the police did not try to pin it on an "easy" suspect.

Overall, the police across jurisdictions in the Bundy case were good. They cared. They were doing their best. Were there mistakes made? Sure. They were human so that is likely. But they weren't ignoring information or just letting him get away.

The reason he was able to get away in Colorado was something that Knoll refuses to acknowledge and attempts to actively refute, which is that Bundy was smart and charming and charismatic and able to get people off their guard. Knoll, in the narrative, says that Bundy was called charming and handsom by the media simply because it makes a better story. She portrays Pamela, Tina, and everyone with whom Pamela interacts say that Bundy is awkward and kind of pathetic. Even near the end of Ruth's storyline when you see Bundy abduct her, she says she feels sorry for him, not that she's charmed.

This is just not true. He was charming. He was able to make people believe him. And he was intelligent. He was smart enough to do well in law school. He just didn't want to do the work. He was able to hide from people and keep them from knowing who he actually was. It was only when he was around people a long time that he couldn't always keep his mask in place with them. This part of the story would have been a lot stronger if Pamela found him monsterous and ugly when no one else did and the reason is that she sees him in a feral state having just committed murder so he didn't have his mask in place. Then, when he does have it in place, she can still see through it. Similar to how a domestic abuse victim can see through their abuser's charm when they are out in public.

My Final Straw

Truly the biggest issue I had with the book is that I found it disrespectful to Bundy's victims. Specificall Janice Ott. By all accounts I can find, Janice Ott was happily married to her husband and had a wonderful relationship with her parents. She didn't have any siblings and was just out for a beautiful day.

Knoll turns her into Ruth.

Personally, I think if you are fictionalizing a real person, I think it is your responsibility to make sure the character conforms to the real person. Ruth's entire storyline was there to promote LGBT ideaology. It did not provide additional evidence or anything like that to the overall story. I don't know what Janice Ott would have thought about that. She may have been fine with it. But Knoll doesn't know. She can't know. Not only because Janice Ott is dead, but because her husband and both parents are dead as well. There is no one alive to speak for her. She had no siblings and she had no children. I can't help but wonder if that is the reason Knoll chose her for Ruth.

Conclusion

In the end, I read the entire book. I forced myself through some of it. It wasn't completely terrible. There were some good lines and a few funny moments. However, I think it would have been a much more powerful story if it focused on Tina and Ruth's story. If it was told from Tina's point of view and it was focused on her quest for justice for Ruth, and if it were complete fiction and inspired by Bundy but not copying his crimes exactly, it could have been very compelling. There could even have been two timelines and then in the modern-day timeline is when Tina gets information about where Ruth might be buried.

As it was I feel like Knoll was trying to get the benefits of both fiction and fact. But she is not artful enough to effectively walk the line. I doubt I'll pick up anything else by Jessica Knoll. Even if I take out the reality of the Bundy case, I just didn't like her writing. I would not recommend.