A true crime epic that points out the many, many differences in India's cultural mores and the rest of the owrld. Two girls die and the system fails them both before and after death.

Thanks to Grove Atlantic, Netgalley and the author for an ARC of this book. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I know I am about way too late to be leaving a review here. I actually read this book some months ago. It's an incredible read and well-worth picking up for any true crime buffs.

It's written with empathy and cultural understanding and it doesn't shy away from the truths of modern India.
If you want great writing, an explosive true story and to learn something completely new, you need to read this book.

This is a hard and heart breaking read. If you are into True Crime this is the book for you but go in knowing that there is not a happy ending to this story and it will rip your heart out

This was a really interesting look at a crime from an area of the world I don't know enough about. It was sad how parts of the story seemed so crazily third world for a crime committed in 2014 and how if the media hadn't gotten involved in the case almost no investigating would have been done at all.

The story did get a little bogged down in stats and, as a result, got quite dry at times.

You know what was a particularly hard read as India is struggling with a second Covid wave from hell? A book on the botched incompetent investigation into the mysterious deaths of two girls found hanging in a rural field. This is a well done book that explores EVERYTHING wrong (I presume, there's like 463486394 angles Faleiro took here) with Indian society/country including caste-system, poor infrastructure (particularly chilling when you learn about the hospitals), patriarchy (so much patriarchy from the expectations on girls to the tolerated laziness of men), lack of access to toilets, corruption on like every level, political incompetance, so.much.patriarchy, female vulnerability, etc etc etc. You do not come away with any faith, at all, in the official conclusions. Faleiro also pulls in a lot of relevant cases so it's not just this case in Baduan, it's all of India. Wow, ithis book's bleak.

This book broke my heart in a way that no other has done in a very long time. A true crime revolving around the deaths of two young girls found hanging in an orchard. Rumors and speculation surround the case. Were they murdered? Raped and murdered? Was it an honor killing carried out by the fathers of the two girls?

It is stories such as this where we are reminded even now, oppression still exists. I was honestly not overly familiar with the customs and beliefs in India before reading this but I felt the author did an amazing job highlighting the challenges Indian girls and women face in their lives, as well as some of the political difficulties
some of the poorer communities face. The author gave incredible detail not just on the characters but the overall incompetency of the police investigation along with other examples showing this isn't exactly an uncommon occurrence.

I definitely recommend this if you are a fan of true crime. I would say this story is more heartbreaking in its detail rather than disturbing in detail. (Although there is some graphic explanation about the bodies, I don't think it was overly gruesome detail).Solid 5 stars, since writing a book with so much detail about a foreign country and their politics in a way that a reader not only doesn't feel completely lost but also keeps the pages turning is a significant accomplishment.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for this copy of The Good Girls by Sonia Faleiro.

The Good Girls is a good example of the ideal true crime book. There is a crime, in this case two teenaged girls from Uttar Pradesh in India are found dead. There are suspects, in this case the suspects are many and varied depending on who is relating the course of events. There are police who are not very good at their job, in this case all of them. There is a resolution but I won't give that away. It's a heartwrenching story of two girls lost before they were even old enough to really live.

I really enjoyed The Good Girls as Sonia Faleiro obviously knows a lot about the subject matter and the culture that she writes about. I can see how it may be a challenging read for anyone not well-versed in the culture of India but I didn't find the cultural aspects to be particularly distracting from the storytelling. For true crime fans this is definitely worth the read.

This is a devastating book. All the more so, because the horrifying facts it lays out are all true, meticulously researched and painstakingly delivered, end to end, to build a picture you absolutely won’t want to acknowledge, because it’s just so awful, but you can’t simply look away - because if you do, then aren’t we also somehow also partly accountable?

There is no other way to describe it than, in the authors words “a systemic social failure.”

Starting and ending with:

“An Indian woman’s first challenge is surviving her own home.”

As we learn in the pages of this book, there is no other culture, not even war-torn Syria, that has as deeply entrenched a history of violence, rape and subrogation of women as India. In this nation of 1.4 billion people, fully half of its citizens don’t count for much at all. They exist to bring a good dowry, bear children, toil to serve their husbands, and most importantly, honour (or at least, not dishonour) the family name (by socially unacceptable actions including owning or talking on a cell phone, or “wandering” too far from home). (Yes, this is a current day book).

For breaking the honour code is a fate punishable by death - and this is largely death at the hand of your own family.

This book tells the story, the true story, of two teenagers, (named, for the sake of this narrative, Padma and Lalli). They are respectively sixteen and fourteen years old - good girls, who leave school in the eighth grade, as befits their gender, to dedicate their lives to working hard, every day to prepare their families food, feed their goats, harvest in the fields, get through another day and sink exhaustedly onto their thin mats to sleep each night. Waiting to be married off, as Parma shortly will be, to a mate chosen by her father, for whom she will carry on, playing the same role but now under the rule of her husband and new family.

Until the day Padma and Lalli are both found, one blazingly hot day in May 2014, hanging from a tree, and the lives of this small community are forever turned upside down.

For those of us on the outside reading this book and looking in, there is no easy way to understand a culture so deeply buried in impenetrable convictions about human worthiness tied to one’s caste, one’s religion (Hindu vs Muslim) and one’s gender - with the vast majority of the population struggling under generations of crushing poverty, and non-existent infrastructure (no running water, toilets, gas or electricity) . And even for advocates of social or government-orchestrated change - fairness and justice are nonexistent in this world consisting of wealthy, corrupt and criminal politicians and their posses of inept thugs manning the police forces.

This book is a challenging read, and I’ll find it hard to put some of its images behind me. But its story needs to be told, and this author, an investigative journalist, does a beautiful job helping us understand the context around this tragedy and what it teaches us about shame, about mortality, and about power.

Trigger warnings: strong abuse narratives including horrific historically accurate description of the 2002 Gujarat riots.

A big thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for an advance review copy of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.

A sad, sad, irreconcilable, inevitable stinking wrench of a mea culpa tale. Impressed with the manner of storytelling and the level of foot-work research done for this true crime book which goes beyond the headlines, the derived-from-investigations material and required interviews, to reveal microscopic details of a people, their lives, characteristics and mindsets, traditions; an entire landscape of the policing, the politics, the investigations and the culture of each, defined more by the people heading each, than the requirements of the job to resolve the alleged crime. Extremely relatable and easy-to-understand for South Asian readers. Good one. Will leave you broken-hearted.

Did not like: the author is heavily invested in the notion that life for village girls and women is a laborious one, diminishing and not telling what the boys and men do all day long, all their lives.

A bit of a dramatic over-reach is when author claims that maybe her paths crossed with ‘Pappu’ (she never got to meet him). Weren’t there any pictures of him in papers or CBI reports for her to confirm what he looked like?


Memorable passages / quotes:

The image was shown on news channels. It migrated to Twitter where the outrage was viral. If social media conversations that morning were taken at face value, it seemed everyone was in favor of ending caste, patriarchy and gender violence, of bringing education, professional opportunities and toilets to rural women. If they had all those things, the comments implied then none of this might have happened. The hashtag #BuduanRape, referring to the district in which Katra village was located, started to trend.

An editor at Times Now, the nation’s top-rated news channel, which had styled itself on America’s incendiary Fox News, later told a reporter, ‘We brought in a lot of what was happening in TV soap operas into the way we were treating our stories. We brought in alarmist music and a soundtrack to our reportage.’

To the men it appeared as though the girls had been killed. Why else would they be in a tree?

Lala Ram had been doing this job for almost two decades , but he wasn’t at all qualified to do it. For years, he had worked alongside his father Bulaki, skipping school to tend to animals and crops.....In 1992, he was sweeping, washing and disinfecting the post-mortem house. Three years later, when the person whose job it was the examine dead bodies quit, Lala Ram was asked to step in. He obviously didn’t have a medical degree, but neither did his predecessor......Hospital records continued to list him as ‘grade four’ employee, a category reserved for unskilled labourers of low rank, such as sweepers.

The first time Lala Ram found himself alone in the post-mortem house he looked around for a set of medical instruments. He found none, because the hospital couldn’t afford them. So, just like the man before him, he set off to the bazaar and purchased knives, a hammer, a wooden mallet, some needles, a spool of thread and a set of scales from a vegetable vendor. He liked to work in slippers because blood washed easily from rubber.

In 2014, the (new post-mortem) building was finally ready, and hospital doctors flocked to admire the well-equipped rooms.....But it was inevitable tat things wouldn’t go according to plan....Hospital personnel claimed they couldn’t find anyone to guard it at night....Thieves pounced....It was only a matter of time, the beleaguered Lala Ram said, before they marched off with the front door.

Finally, someone offered the police his wedding video to tape over.....The tape ran out and the videographer slipped in a new one. This second tape had been used to record a music and dance performance.

The girls’ hair was neat. Their glass bangles were intact.

Since they couldn’t control crime, they controlled the number of reported crimes. Police officers spoke of a ‘blanket ban’ and ‘monthly maximum quotas’ to keep crime statistics low, allowing the party in power to boast that they were at least doing better than their predecessors......And yet, thousands of girls were reported kidnapped or abducted in UP in 2014. Some were taken for ransom, others were murdered....There were 7,338 cases of kidnapping and abduction just for ‘marriage’ according to the National Crime Records Bureau.

In 1972, a teenager (in Maharashtra) had walked into a police station to settle a dispute ad was only allowed to leave after the police officer had sexually assaulted her. Her name was Mathura and she was an orphan who belonged to an indigenous community......(Supreme Court acquitted all accused, when law put burden of proof on the victim) .....The transcript read:

‘[....] no marks of injury were found on the person of the girl after the incident and their absence goes a long way to indicate that the alleged intercourse was a peaceful affair and that the story of the stiff resistance having been put up by the girl is all false. It is further clear that the averments on the part of the girl that she had been shouting loudly for help are also a tissue of lies.’

“Why should we hide our daughter’s name? Asha Devi said. “My daughter was not at fault. And by hiding crimes, we only allow more crimes to take place.....We are proud of our daughter. She got immortalised as ‘Nirbhaya’.....Memories are paiful but her name will serve as a reminder to the society to never let such things recur.. I say this in front of you all that her name was Jyoti Singh.”

(In Bhanwari Devi case) Accused (Gujjars from her village in Rajasthan) were acquitted on the grounds that ‘a member of the higher caste cannot rape a member of lower caste because of reasons of purity,’

The day she met the Shakya family, Maywati - whose net worth was estimated at 15.6million USD - gave Lalli’s father Sohan Lal and Padma’s father Jeevan Lal 5 lakh rupees each, in cash. Another party gave them 5.5 lakh rupees each, also in cash. On 1 June, Sohan Lal’s bank balance was zero rupees. By 5 June, it was 10.5 lakh rupees. The family accepted other sums of money, large and small, from leaders of diverse ideological backgrounds.

The prime minister tweeted constantly in the days after the hangings. He tweeted about football, Bhutan, organic farming, Vladimir Putin, blood donation, and World Environment Day, but he didn’t mention Katra.

Hindu boys in RSS shakhas, writes the scholar Taika Sarkar, are bred on a steady diet of legends - ‘Partition-time rapes of Hindu women, rapes of Hindu queens under Muslim rule, [and] abductions of Hindu women all through history by Muslims.’

In 2007, Modi named one of the leading (Gujarat) rioters, who was later convicted for her role in killing 97 people, as his junior minister for women and child development.

He readily agreed on the condition that he could implicate someone he strongly disliked in the kidnapping.

...the girls were alive at the time they climbed the tree. And they had climbed it themselves. The girls’ bodies were virtually pristine. (Dr. Rajiv Gupta)

It was then confirmed that the boy had been found being intimate with the girl. Her family, to protect their daughter’s honour, had claimed that she had been raped. Then, to protect their honour, they had paid the jailer and some of his men to kill the (fifteen-year old) boy.

A tainted girl tainted the village, people said. What was happening in the Shakya household wouldn’t just be a failure of parenting, but of citizenship.

The record showed an exchange of 377 calls between Pappu’s phone and one of the Shakya’s phones. The calls covered a period of six months. A further 48 calls were exchanged between Pappu’s phone and a second Shakya phone.

An Indian woman’s first challenge was surviving her own home. - Sonia Faleiro, Author

In May 2014, at a remote hamlet named Katra in the Budaun district of western Uttar Pradesh, two young girls were found hanging from a mango tree in a neighbour's orchard. This incident is infamous in recent history as the 2014 Badaun rape.

The two girls, given pseudonyms of Padma and Lalli in this book to cater to government rules of not naming victims of sexual assaults, were 16 and 14 years old. The elder girl had been taken out of school after the 8th grade and her family was looking out for a suitable match for her when they incident occurred. After the bodies were found hanging, the family opted for an unexpected method of seeking relief: they refused to allow the bodies to be brought down until justice was served.

With the information I've given you so far, assuming you have no detailed memory of the actual case, you would have reached your own conclusions about the girls' deaths. I did too when the book started. And I was proven wrong, again and again.

You must have read thrillers with unreliable narrators. Now imagine a true life story with unreliable narrators who seem to have their own private agenda behind everything they publicly claim. Who/what do you believe?

This book doesn't offer you an insight into sexual assaults against women or caste rivalries or political manipulations or police mishandling of cases or the medical bungling in the hinterland, though all of these are included to varying degrees. What it gives you is a detailed timeline of what happened on May 27th 2014 up to a few months later. You feel like you are a part of the ongoing investigation and the happenings around you are spinning out of control. You won't understand whom to trust, you won't know whom to point fingers at, you won't understand where to hit your head in frustration. You would assume that two girls disappearing in the middle of the night would unify everyone in the quest to locate them. But no, there are still so many things to consider first: the family name, the girls' reputation, the fear of police, the caste of the possible kidnappers... You just keep taking in fact after fact, hoping to make sense of the situation. But you won't be able to. Because whatever happened is utterly, shamefully senseless and your urban mind simply won't be able to digest the ridiculous thinking that passes in the name of honour in this country.

I couldn't read the book at a stretch though I found it difficult to keep aside. I kept needing breathers to calm myself down because some of the scenes were simply too aggravating. Even something that I take for granted in my life - a mobile phone - took on a very different meaning when viewed from the eyes of these villagers.

The author has done a lot of research and it shows. I don't know how far this book will work for a non-Indian reader. The casteist mentality is something only we will understand (to whatever extent it can be justifiably understood.) Though the author has a tendency to include too much information at times, I felt it was necessary so that even those without an understanding of how rural India functions will be able to get the situation as it unfolded. She doesn't hesitate in calling a spade a spade. I admire her for going to the heartland of the case and interviewing all the people involved, in spite of knowing their mentality about women. That was brave! There are some grammatical errors in the book but I kept those aside willingly; this is one instance where the content is more important than the language.

Don't read this to know what girls go through in this country; you already know that. Read it to understand the psyche of people in rural India, especially of men when it comes to the women in their lives. You must have heard the term "comedy of errors" many times. This book will give you an example of a "tragedy of errors."

As regards Padma and Lalli, they will forever be enshrined as "the good girls"; you will know the significance of my statement only if you read the book.

Thank you, NetGalley and Grove Atlantic, for the Advanced Review Copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

The Good Girls is a comprehensive story of the investigation of two murdered girls in rural India. I found the book to be particularly fascinating as the author delves into the political and cultural aspects of how this crime is processed and investigated. It was truly hard to read how money and politics can change the course of an investigation and whether justice can truly be served in that part of the world. The author plants you in the middle of this fascinating culture and carefully weaves the storylines from the families, other villagers, the police and the politicians.

Thank you netgalley and the publisher for providing a copy for me to read. All opinions are my own.

Set in a rural Indian village, two young girls go missing. They leave their homes at night, never to return. A true story that, like the Delhi rape, got national attention. It's a story that's all too typical of India where rumors grow into facts, lawlessness prevails in the communities, and village women are sentenced to death. Protecting the woman's honor, her family, and her community is of utmost importance, often resulting in inhumane consequences for the targeted woman.

My review for Booklist is here:
https://www.booklistonline.com/The-Good-Girls-An-Ordinary-Killing-/pid=9739338

The review is also cross-posted to my Smithsonian BookDragon blog here:
http://smithsonianapa.org/bookdragon/the-good-girls-an-ordinary-killing-by-sonia-faleiro-in-booklist/

In 2014, the (fairly hysterical and sensationalist ) Indian media started reporting on the deaths of 2 girls in Badaun, a district in Uttar Pradesh, that's a 6 hours drive from Delhi. There were constant replays of the extremely disturbing images of the girls' bodies, and it was reported as a gang-rape, with talking heads giving us their 2 cents worth day and night for about a month. Then, as usual, it was completely forgotten about. A year later, the CBI reported the results of their investigation and declared their deaths as suicides, and in the typical halfhearted manner of most reporting in India, we weren't told anything more. In a country where nearly 30 suicides are reported every day, the loss of these lives was added to those horrifying statistics. Sonia Faleiro, in the afterword to this book, writes of how this book started off as a book on sexual assault on women in India, when this happened, and you couldn't escape the coverage. She then decided to ground her research in this incident in Badaun, and travelled to India, spoke to as many people as she could, got access to as many records as were available. This book is the result of all those years of meticulous research, and it traces the incident in Badaun, from when it occurred, to the police investigation and the subsequent handover to the CBI. Through this, the author masterfully gives you an insight into how India truly functions, the long shadows of the caste system, over all aspects of life, from daily interactions to local governments to policing, and even forensics. I found this book a landmark in true crime-since it started off as a macroscopic work on sexual assault, the author shows you the very specific societal context that all led to this tragedy happening, and most importantly, how all of those affect policing, and can even lead to a perversion of justice. Her effective use of statistics drives the horror of it home, that this might be one devastating tragedy, but it will be repeated, when the social constructs that drove this remain the same. At no instance, however, does the reader lose sight of all the humans at the heart of this, their actions, and the fallout- the arrests made on the basis of caste, the disproportionate effect on women-restrictions on even the slightest of freedoms enjoyed by the women in the district, the need for some families to move fearing violent reprisals for a crime that didn't happen. Patriarchy and misogyny are so firmly entrenched that access to modern technology is firstly restricted mostly to men, and perverted to serve their needs. The benefits of wider access to new ways of thinking are completely ignored, because why would you want a world where your power was supposedly diminished by women no longer being under your thumb? The proximity of Badaun to the national capital hasn't made the slightest difference to centuries of social conditioning and the valorisation of "tradition" in Bollywood movies really hasn't helped either. Class and caste privilege could literally mean the difference between life and death.

As I type out this review ( from my position of privilege), there are news reports of a girl killed by her family because she married someone from a different caste. It's deeply distressing to read, more young lives lost because women are trying to assert their agency, and it's a tragedy that's considered the crime, and not murder. This is the true heart of darkness- modes of thinking that lead to the deaths of so many young people. this is a vitally important book.

Thanks a lot, NetGalley!

What a gripping and heartbreaking tale of oppression, fear and desperation. Falerio provides a gut-wrenching story of what life is like for women who are in the lower caste of women in the poorest area of the country.

The police were untrustworthy, corrupt and incompetent. The politicians were weak-willed and didn't care. The fathers were often more concerned about their family's reputation than finding the person, or persons, responsible for the murder of two young girls. The scientists tasked with finding evidence of a crime were performing autopsies in a pasture.

In short, only the mothers were willing to fight for and force the world to pay attention to these crimes, which were but the latest in a generation's long list of horrific crimes against women.

There are so many lessons to take away from this book that should be assigned reading for those interested not only in true crime but sociology, world politics and feminism in Third World countries.

The author does an amazing job painting a clear picture of neglect and inadequacy of the UP, and (unlicensed) Pathologist involved in the case. Even the family themselves were unreliable for witness testimony. It covers the Caste system, and how along with sexism and perpetual rape culture in India, makes room for honor killings and abuse of power for lower caste and women/girls.

Overall, this is a book that deserved a spot on the Bestseller list. It raises awareness, and never handles topics insensitively. It’s respectful, and does not take a side - though the author sometimes delivers clever humor that can be missed. I found this novel beautiful and heartbreaking, I wrote down the names. I know they have been changed, but it meant no less to me. I’m so glad I have been given a chance to read this.

I found the Huffington Post article that posted the image of the girl’s bodies, and was disgusted that they falsley reported as fact that these girls committed suicide. They showed every intention of living, they even had just got 100 rupees to spend. This is an attempt of the bureau to ignore the way India horrifically treats it’s women and girls. When they couldn’t blame anyone else due to them ruining evidence, they tried to blame the girls themselves.

This book also made me look into Indian Documentaries on life there, especially for Lower caste and women. The book does an amazing way of showing this without having to tell you a whole lot. It conveys the aspects of life perfectly, in a shorter time then the documentaries. Overall, a good read - but one that is serious, and depressing. It still does not block out the light of both girls lives though.

The only thing I suggest is keeping this cover, and switching the Amazon one.

Thank you sincerely to Netgalley and the Publisher, for giving me a copy of the ARC to read. I loved and appreciated it, and plan on buying.

Padma and Lalli, inseparable cousins and friends, were only 16 and 14 when they were killed. As their small village in Uttar Pradesh was rather underdeveloped in hygienic and housing terms, the girls needed to go to the nearby fields to relieve themselves. One night in 2014, they went missing and were found hanging in the orchard a couple of hours later. Rumours spread fast about what might have happened and who could be responsible for their deaths, however, even though national media became interested in the case, investigations took their time and the police only reluctantly tried to solve the case. Girls from lower classes have never been high priority and their death seemed to cause more nuisance than alarm.

“This negligence contributed to an epidemic of missing and exploited children, many of them trafficked within and outside the country.”

Sonia Faleiro’s book is a true crime account of how the girls’ lives might have looked like in their last hours, the immediate reaction of the families and villagers and also a lot of facts which help to understand the circumstances in which this crime could take place. The subheading “An Ordinary Killing” already gives away a lot: the murder of girls and women had become to ordinary in India that people didn’t bat an eyelid anymore. However, the events of 2012, when a student was violated in a bus, made worldwide headlines and stirred protests which finally made people aware of the hostile and misogynist climate they were living in.

“Although Delhi was notoriously unsafe, stories about sexual assault didn’t often make the news.”

There are a lot of factors which enabled the murder of Padma and Lalli, their status as girls, their belonging to an inferior class, the remoteness and backwardness of their village – many standards and rights we in the western world take for granted simply do not apply there. But it is not only the crime itself which is abhorrent, also the situation of the police – understaffed, ill-equipped, prone to bribery – and even more of the medical examiner – without any training, just doing the job because nobody else would do it with the logical result of a post-mortem which is simply absurd – are just incredible.

What I found most interesting was actually not the girls’ story and the dynamics in the village afterwards but the background information. Sonia Faleiro convincingly integrates them into the narrative which thus becomes informative while being appealing to read. I’d rather call it a journalistic piece of work than fiction and it is surely a noteworthy contribution to the global discussion on women’s rights.

This is an extremely well-told account of a real-life tragedy in recent times. The mysterious deaths of two teenage girls in a patriarchal, rural Indian society that had the nation gripped for months doesn't just come to light in this narrative; it is given added depth and layers to reveal how the event transformed the lives of all those involved and affected. It reveals, yet again, how society is collectively responsible for most of the terrible crimes and tragedies that take place. Rarely is it the work of lone individuals, as news reportage would have us believe. Don't simply read this book to understand how our world works; read it to ponder on how we can collectively transform our world.

[NOTE: I hope to place a review with a publication for the book as well. If accepted, I will share the link here later.]

‘If the girls were alive, what step would you have taken for the honour of the family?’

‘We would have killed them’, he replied.

The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing is a detailed reportage on the infamous Budgaon double death case in Uttar Pradesh. This small village caught the national media’s attention when two cousins were found hanging from a tree in their family’s tobacco orchard, The case had all the perfect elements for sensationalism: caste prejudice, presumption of rape, murder, political vote banks and maladministration. This book, however, is a lot more than just the case. It sheds light on all aspects that plague rural India which include everyday instances where police officers refuse to act and are biased towards their own caste, the oppression of the poor and marginalized, gender prejudice and societal stereotypes that allow young girls only as much freedom as patriarchy can fathom. It is a society where honour of the family is more important to a father more than seeking justice for his daughter and niece.

This book has been an eye opener in many senses and gives a very clear unfiltered picture of rural India, especially Uttar Pradesh, the state that tops the chart for crimes against women and where the government, irrespective of party affiliations, is only known for their inaction. What absolutely has to be mentioned is Sonia’s impeccably and tight narrative style that doesn’t let you put down the book unless you get to the end of it. It almost felt like a thriller as I was pacing through it.

Thanks to the publisher for providing the e-arc.
This book didn't surprise me and that is a disturbing fact. We are so used to crime against women, police incompetence, broken systems, botched investigations and corrupt practices that nothing is a surprise anymore.

'One night in the summer of 2014' two girls of the Katra village, Sadatganj, UP went out to defecate in the fields and never returned home. The next morning they were found hanging from a tree in an orchard. Padma & Lalli (names changed) were first cousins and thick as thieves. They were always together, herding their goats or working in the farms, chatting up with other girls or snooping out at night. Together in life and in death.

Sonia Faleiro takes up this case as the centerpiece of her book which is about so much more than just a case. With a stupendous amount of research comprising of more than 200 interviews, chargesheets and investigation notes, news items, youtube videos, testimonies and more, the author draws a compulsively readable narrative of the whats, whys and hows of the said case.

The book is written like a true crime novel but the minute you are lulled into thinking it is just a story, it hits you in the face with cold facts, case studies, dialogues from the victims' family members and statistics about crimes against women.

As you read further, you realise that all of this happened, for real, two teenage girls hanging from a tree, the hours of protest by family members, the botched up post mortem, the news room drama, the twitter trends, the half hearted investigation, the CBI intervention and the trauma the family went through.

Faleiro also goes on tangents to tell the readers about the laws regarding rape and crimes against women, how they came to be, the different cases that made the fast track courts spring up or helped in formulating the stricter and more sensitive laws.
She also provides us with context of how things go about in the rural India, the lives of women, the education they are provided and why, the false sense of freedom, the history of crime in and around the area, the socio-political scene, and the subtle and not so subtle powerplay of castes and sub-castes.

The Good Girls is a brilliant book, one backed with stunning research and simple yet engaging writing. This is something which should be a staple read.