REVIEW: Bright Young Women

A short review of Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll.

In my first year of University the Netflix documentary series about Ted Bundy was released on Netflix. I didn’t watch it, I was too afraid it might give me nightmares, but my roommate watched it (she loved true crime). I remember coming back to our room the night she finished it. She jumped when I walked in and had me text our friend Andrew to come and spend the night on our floor so that she could feel safe. Andrew and I giggled when she went to the bathroom holding our kettle as a weapon in case anyone was in there (it was the heaviest thing we owned). But when she came back to our room and told us about how Ted Bundy specifically targeted women in sorority houses or on university campuses and the brutal ways those women were raped and murdered, I understood her fear. That even though we were in a tiny town on the edge of eastern Scotland far away from Ted Bundy’s stomping grounds, there could easily be another one of him out there, just as amiable, just as normal-looking, the kind of guy a judge would describe as a ‘bright young man’, just as the judge did in Ted Bundy’s trial.

The title of the book, Bright Young Women, by Jessica Knoll is centered on that judge’s address. This book does not tell the story of Ted Bundy; in fact, it never mentions him by name, only referring to him as The Defendant, but it tells the story of the many women whose lives he affected, focusing on three. The first is Pamela, the president of her sorority at Florida State whose best friend was raped and killed by The Defendant in one of his last killing sprees before being finally arrested and sent to trial. The second is Tina, a woman she meets soon after, who has followed the case down to Florida, trying to get vengeance and closure for her friend Ruth. The third woman is Ruth herself, as the story jumps back and forth from before she was abducted to four years later when the FSU sorority killings happened, all the way to 2021, when these women are still searching for the last shreds of closure.

This book was utterly devastating. At the same time, why the story was so shattering might be unexpected. It is mostly because of the pieces I recognized from my own and my friends’ lives. It is not because of the trauma itself, but because of the banality of the way Tina, Pamela, and most every woman in the book are spoken down to and treated by everyone in power. Pamela expresses her own understanding of the status of the women when watching her surviving friends of the attack testify at the trial, speaking in detail of the horrors that occurred and what had happened to them. Pamela says, “These were not things that the girls would have talked about unless they were compelled to under oath. They wouldn’t have wanted people to pity them or think they were complaining. Nobody liked a complainer, and we wanted so much for people to think well of us.” (page 316) The book shows how people like Ted Bundy had slipped through the cracks, and the underlying misogyny that still persists in our political and judicial system. Things have not changed. Look at the recent case of college student Brock Turner, whose father defended him saying that his son shouldn’t have to go to prison for ’20 minutes of action’. He ended up getting only 6 months in prison, the judge feeling sorry for how much that might affect him, with no thought to the woman in the scenario who would have to deal with the emotional aftermath for her entire life.

Nothing is more striking than a historical novel that could have been set in the present day. It is funny that my only wish for the book was that it would have a more satisfying ending. But I see why Knoll couldn’t write that. It’s simply not the truth. This book was an important read for me, to know these stories instead of the sensationalized ones. It’s an extremely difficult read, but one that needs to be read, for the sake of not only Bundy’s victims, but those of other, less famous killers, who died in similar ways and who shouldn’t be forgotten.

4.75 STARS

Where to buy online: https://www.waterstones.com/book/bright-young-women/jessica-knoll/9781509839995

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