A review by brettpet
Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha
3.0
I'm pretty conflicted on Your House Will Pay. It's an ambitious effort that wraps mystery, social justice, and family drama into a tight plot with little filler. Steph Cha does a great job of giving each of the characters (and this book is chock-full of characters) a unique personality and motivation (aside from one character, who has a sort of confusing alterior motive revealed later in the book). I didn't find any issue with the prose throughout Pay—its effective and well-utilized, acting as a solid foundation for the story.
The largest issue I had with the novel was that I felt Steph Cha didn't do enough in regards to the real murder case this story is based on, the killing of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins. The crux of this novel is based on a beat-for-beat retelling of the Harlins case, but considering how much of the story revolves around this, I'm a bit baffled on why this didn't end up being a nonfiction book. I also greatly preferred Shawn's (one of the two narrators) story and family drama to Grace, the other narrator. Maybe this was due to me listening to the audiobook and finding Shawn's actor, Glenn Davis, much more lifelike than Grace's actor, Greta Jung.
I don't hesitate to reccomend Your House Will Pay to anyone looking for a tightly-crafted novel based on a tragic civil rights case. I can't help but draw comparison to Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys which is also a fiction novel based on real racial injustice, but takes more liberties and risks with it's story. This is really a one-and-done book, and I don't expect to ever read or think about it much again.
The largest issue I had with the novel was that I felt Steph Cha didn't do enough in regards to the real murder case this story is based on, the killing of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins. The crux of this novel is based on a beat-for-beat retelling of the Harlins case, but considering how much of the story revolves around this, I'm a bit baffled on why this didn't end up being a nonfiction book. I also greatly preferred Shawn's (one of the two narrators) story and family drama to Grace, the other narrator. Maybe this was due to me listening to the audiobook and finding Shawn's actor, Glenn Davis, much more lifelike than Grace's actor, Greta Jung.
I don't hesitate to reccomend Your House Will Pay to anyone looking for a tightly-crafted novel based on a tragic civil rights case. I can't help but draw comparison to Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys which is also a fiction novel based on real racial injustice, but takes more liberties and risks with it's story. This is really a one-and-done book, and I don't expect to ever read or think about it much again.