I like true crime and I’ve read plenty of it in my lifetime, so this review is not a slam on the genre as a whole. I grew up devouring Ann Rule books and I enjoy an examination of a murder, especially one freighted with class and gender issues, as this one was. However, I do think with true crime that the author has to have some sort of basic respect and research ability to make me like the book, and that wasn’t really the case here. It’s very surface level and it didn’t have the depth of analysis that makes a true crime book good in my eyes. I don’t like a book where the author is just cribbing off of the work that they previously did — which is not to say that you can’t start a book off as reporting and a series of articles, but you then have to do some sort of revision work and stop quoting your own articles like you’re impressed by yourself. It just rubs me the wrong way when the author keeps stopping the book, which is about a horrific crime that devastated a family and left several children orphans, to go, I wrote this bit when I was covering the case for Air Mail, here’s a quote from when I was at the trial. That’s just the author bragging about their career and showing off their bona fides, and I don’t care about the author and I don’t want their presence in a book whose subtitle is “The Jennifer Dulos Story.” I felt like much as in life, she ended up subsumed and hard to get into focus by bigger forces and male egos in this book.
I also grasp that Cohen is Jewish but some of the way that he wrote about Jennifer being Jewish and about Jews as a whole really rubbed me the wrong way. There was something treading on the line of his being so hyper-focused on how Jews act and how Jews think and how they’re different. It made me uncomfortable and it felt like he was almost defining them as a separate species, which always gets my back up. He would be jokey about it sometimes, like he was trying to inject humor, but I didn’t find it funny. I think he was trying to be less salacious and more literary throughout, but then the literary aspects where he was trying to write in a more elevated fashion didn’t ring true for me, either. This was like a weird cross between some sort of mass market true crime airport read (which I like and enjoy!) and his attempt to catapult himself into being a serious writer. I just wasn’t buying it and I felt like he was really pushing the fact that he had run in the same circles. He ends up centered in this book as much as she is, if not more. The case itself is really interesting and heartbreaking, and there’s a lot to be said here about domestic violence, issues with family courts, contentious divorces, and the danger women are in when they leave an abusive partner, but none of that was explored with the depth and sensitivity that I thought it deserved. He also seems to blame her mother for not doing as good a job as her father did at handling Jennifer’s volatile husband, which I thought was extra gross. I did finish this but I almost stopped reading it a few times because I was so irritated. Not recommended. Two stars just because I did finish and there was some interesting information in here that I hadn’t known.
