Review: Bradstreet Gate by Robin Kirman

Overview:

 

Georgia, Charlie and Alice each arrive at Harvard with hopeful visions of what the future will hold. But when, just before graduation, a classmate is found murdered on campus, they find themselves facing a cruel and unanticipated new reality. Moreover, a charismatic professor who has loomed large in their lives is suspected of the crime. Though his guilt or innocence remains uncertain, the unsettling questions raised by the case force the three friends to take a deeper look at their tangled relationship. Their bond has been defined by the secrets they’ve kept from one another—Charlie’s love and Alice’s envy, Georgia’s mysterious affair—and over the course of the next decade, as they grapple with the challenges of adulthood and witness the unraveling of a teacher's once-charmed life, they must reckon with their own deceits and shortcomings, each desperately in search of answers and the chance to be forgiven.

A relentless, incisive, and keenly intelligent novel about promise, disappointment, and the often tenuous bonds of friendship, Bradstreet Gate is the auspicious debut of a tremendously talented new writer.

 

Review:

 

This book was a little perplexing for me. I found myself really engrossed in the characters, and what I assumed would be a clear solution to the books mystery: what happened to Julie Patel? Of course, reading the book's description, it's really about the intertwined lives of three students and a professor at Harvard; but the death of another student is the backstory that keeps alluding to more. Without a clear resolution to this secondary story, it feels like the book was somehow cut off. I found myself wanting more from each character. It began questioning their motives and who they really were after spending so many pages with them.  I also felt that the jump between college and ten years later was an interesting plot device not fully realized. Somehow the characters lost their depth as they got older.

Bradford Gate was very well written, and I enjoyed the book, I just felt it was missing a few elements to make it an excellent book. I was looking for a big reveal, and the book ended quite quietly.

 

* I received an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review.