Reviews with content warning for Police brutality - Know My Name

Reviews tagging 'Police brutality'

Know My Name by Chanel Miller

34 reviews

readandfindout's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

4.75

Style/writing: 4.5 stars
Themes: 5 stars
Perspective/knowledge: 5 stars

Content Warnings

pucksandpaperbacks's review against another edition

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5.0

CW: sexual assault, police brutality, death, school shooting, misogyny

A must read. A powerful, raw story about the author's sexual assault and the feelings and trauma it brought her. This is a very hard story to read, so please check all of the trigger warnings before reading. I only listed the one's I could remember. This is a story that will make you angry for the right reasons. Fuck Brock Turner and fuck the justice system that keeps failing victims of sexual assault. I felt so hard for Chanel as she tried to balance her life while going through trials and her own trauma. The way this affected her and her family was brutal.

Know My Name is beautifully written. The way Chanel shares stories of her life and experiences and connects them back to the Standford case shows how talented she is as a writer. Chanel recounts all of her feelings from the time she was assaulted to the end of the trial as her mind is spinning in circles. She takes the reader through her life mapping out every location and every detail worth noting. I read Know My Name via audiobook which is narrated by Chanel Miller and you can hear her emotion really come through. What a heartbreaking but notable story. I wrote down so many quotes because Chanel's words were so lyrical. I'm so glad I read this and it's a story I will never forget.

Some of my favorite quotes:
“Why should I carry the shame for the things that were done to my body?”
“I wondered how it happened, that I was now spending more time with my rapist than with my friends”

“Victims are usually automatically accused of lying, but when a perpetrator is exposed for lying, the stigma doesn’t stick. Why is it that we’re wary of victims making false accusations but rarely consider how many men have blatantly lied about, downplayed, or manipulated others to cover their own actions?”

“I was tired of existing as an object of observation. Powerless as my narrative was written for me.”

“Is an apology valid without change?”

“The judge had given Brock something that would never be extended to me: empathy”.

“I’ve grown used to being unseen, never being fully known. It did not feel possible that I could be the protagonist”

“Victims are all around you”

“Victims are not fractions. We are whole”

“The truth holds weight”

“Assault is NOT an accident”

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marissasa's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

After crying many times throughout the 12 days it took me to read this, I sobbed through the ending of the memoir with Chanel's victim impact statement that I had read once before and similarly sobbed to back when it was viral on Buzzfeed in 2016. This is one of if not the most important book I have ever read and there were countless moments throughout that I was left breathless and with chills down my back. This story is so important, Chanel's writing is so important, and the hard realities of the way victims, especially victims of sexual assault, are treated in the justice system are so important to recognize and call out. This book should be mandatory reading for everyone who thinks they know anything about legal justice in America, and honestly for anyone who cares about victims of sexual assault. So much of what is shown in the media is tainted by bias and by politics, and Chanel does not shy away from detailing in all the gruesome ways that her rapist, the law, the media, and society have uprooted her life and left her to pick up the pieces. Despite all this she is somehow able to find the strength and resilience within her to uplift millions of other victims who have read her statement and felt seen, felt heard, felt themselves having a voice again in a world that wouldn't listen. She and her work will live in my heart and mind for the rest of my time on earth as I navigate being a woman whose boundaries were once crossed. Thank you, Chanel.

Content Warnings