A Murder Mystery Is Revisited in the #MeToo Era

Janet Potter reviews Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You, a boarding school novel and a murder mystery, and the story of a woman reexamining the gender politics of her teen years.

Rebecca Makkai lives at a boarding school where no one has ever been murdered. She wants to be clear on this point because her new novel is set at one where someone has. I Have Some Questions for You is about murder and memory and reconciling your past self with your adult one.

A native of Lake Bluff, Makkai lives at a boarding school campus, where her husband is on the faculty and where she attended high school. She is the author of the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, though it was her 2018 novel, The Great Believers, set among a community of gay men during the 1980s AIDS epidemic in Chicago, that put her on the map. It was an enormous critical and popular success and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.