A review by vermilionhues
Penance by Eliza Clark

dark

3.0

the format of penance was unlike anything i've read before, and managed to point out a lot of the problems with the true-crime industry that it seems a lot of people ignore (fandom activity rallying around school shooters, for example). it was an immersive world, and a lot of the formatting surrounding the online presence of the characters and the cutaways to podcasters were interesting... but I found myself skipping over a lot, especially
the parts where there was an invented school shooter duo seemingly based on the real events at columbine high school... then is revealed during a very detailed description of the fictional school shooting that these shooters had actually been "inspired" by the columbine shooters. this whole section felt very weird to read and its inclusion seemed super unnecessary. seems weird to be both a novel that points out that the culture around true crime is harmful and yet uses a very real, very tragic event to inspire the characters carrying out their own version of it.
I get what she was trying to do, but by the end I couldn't help but feel I was reading some weird meta fanfic-within-a-fanfic about school murders patting itself on the back for being anti-true crime.    
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