Review of Penance by Eliza Clark

*Penance* by Eliza Clark (2023). Published by Faber & Faber.

There was a hot minute where I began to see Penance everywhere. I opened up my Instagram, and there it is, girls posting the cover of the book with their perfect manicures and lattes. I look at my review websites, and there it is, with a solid positive review about what is contained within its covers.

I usually tend to trust the review websites over the popular Instagram accounts, as I follow more review sites curated to my taste versus random social media people. For a bit, I had no idea what this book was about, but I didn’t end up bothering to check it out.

One day in 2024 I stumbled upon it at the library, on the display, and decided to read what the synopsis was. And man, I was so interested in what the book had to say after that, as it was something right up my alley.

Plus, it was an experimental book. I like to read literature that has more of an experimental bent and an unconventional narrative style.

I ended up reading this over the course of a week—let’s get into the review before I start rambling too much!

An investigation of a brutal murder of a girl by her fellow female classmates in the English countryside.

There are some major trigger warnings involved with this book, as a girl ends up being bullied to death, and we do get a description of another girl basically being killed by a water slide and another going down the slide, finding the body in the process because it got caught. All in all, this is such a dark novel.

We begin this novel knowing how the poor girl, a victim of bullying, ends up dying. Several of her classmates lured her out onto the beach, where they kill her slowly and brutally.

We don’t learn from their perspective though originally—our narrator is a journalist with an agenda. This is a novel compiling all of their research.

This is also a novel about agendas. While each chapter is broken up into each girl’s story, digging deeper into their role in the murder and trying to figure out what had happened, everyone always ends up having their own reasons and motives. Set in a sleepy town on the English coast, no one really wants to go to this dying place.

That said, there are definitely cliques being formed within the people living there. One of the girls involved with the murder is the daughter of someone influential in the area, as we see a chunk of the book exploring how the local school girls would sort themselves out into categories.

Narrative structure and how the story told is one of the highlights of the novel, as we learn about everything in a true crime style. Bringing in podcasts, interviews, and scripts, there’s a compelling way this story is told, one that reflects the current state of this world.

Although it’s fiction, to me it mirrored how the act of murder and such a story becomes a public spectacle. From the nitty gritty details of these girls lives to how such brutal acts were described so easily by a journalist, who is going to benefit from this horrible story, is off putting to me.

Yet, at the same time, it makes a compelling story because of how it mixes all of these elements together. Each section puts another piece in the puzzle, until it all finally comes together in the tragic night in which Joan’s life ends.

Overall Thoughts

I found the plot really interesting in this one, but I found that I wasn’t into how the narrative unfolded. I typically do like experimental and hybrid forms, but this one just didn’t do it for me.

All in all though, this a good book to capture the spirit of how the 2010s, especially in the early part of the decade, we were all obsessed with true crime and these stories. They really were a spectacle, but this novel shows us that there were real people involved with all of this.

So a podcast script juxtaposed against these intimate details is jarring, as it is a direct clash of someone else taking the narrative against a real human being. What these girls did was horrible, that’s for sure, but they’re very much a product of the culture of the time—albeit to an extreme.

Give this one a chance if you’re interested in it and haven’t had the chance to read it yet. I think that there was a lot to mull over after closing its covers when finishing.

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