By the award-winning writer of Beautiful Thing an inquest into how the mysterious deaths of two teenage girls shone a light into the darkest corners of a nation.
The story she weaves in exquisite language is as tragic and ugly as it is engrossing ... This story is at heart a Southern Gothic—a Southern Hemisphere Gothic—a tale of stymied sexuality and buried secrets ... The events of the night the girls died are related by a cast of dubious witnesses, secretive family members and drunken and abusive police officers, all of whom Faleiro interviews and brings to life on the page ... The Good Girls is a puzzle with a surprise at the end. It’s a riveting, terrible tale, one all too common, but Faleiro’s gorgeous prose makes it bearable ... This feminist document looks straight at men’s twisted obsession with controlling female sexuality.
Ms. Faleiro had set out to write a book about the epidemic of rape that has beset 21st-century India. The issue had first caught the world’s attention in 2012 when a young medical student was abducted in New Delhi, gang-raped in a bus and murdered with indescribable brutality. Ms. Faleiro had intended to focus on that episode, but the more she examined the tragedy of 'Padma Lalli,' whom everyone presumed had also been raped, the more she was sucked into its vortex—to the exclusion of all else ... The Good Girls is a riveting—sometimes astonishing—work of forensic journalism that chronicles the girls’ lives as well as the circumstances of their death. It highlights the values that prevail in rural north India, particularly the suffocating codes of honor that dictate what women shouldn’t do. In a searing conclusion, Ms. Faleiro compares the Delhi bus rape with the tale of the two hanged girls. The first showed how dangerous public places were for women. The second 'revealed something more terrible still—that an Indian woman’s first challenge was surviving her own home.'
... gripping ... compelling ... Taut with dramatic tension, The Good Girls vividly captures the sights, sounds, smells, preoccupations and oppressiveness of the village ... The book paints a damning picture of non-existent police investigative capacity...also effectively captures the circus-like atmosphere that typically follows heinous crimes in India, where television media trials and political grandstanding replace the painstaking police work required to prepare for a criminal trial.
