Allie Tagle-Dokus is a writer and high school teacher. She received her BFA in writing, literature and publishing from Emerson College and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She currently lives in Gardner, Massachusetts.
Tagle-Dokus's new novel is Lucky Girl.
At Electric Lit the author tagged eight books that reckon with the impacts of cancel culture: seven novels and a play that "ask how we strike the balance between calling out harm and accepting when accountability goes too far." One title on the list:
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca MakkaiRead about another entry on the list.
Rebecca Makkai’s novel tackles our obsession with true crime podcasts as filmmaker Bodie returns to her alma mater to teach some media courses on films and podcasts. Years ago, the campus was rocked by a shocking murder of Bodie’s roommate, amurder she finds herself unpacking with her plucky students. These Gen Zers cannily intuit the police were quick to condemn athletic director Omar, one of the few people of color on campus. The kids get to crafting a podcast that seeks to crack the case open. In the background, Bodie contends with a more personal issue: Her amicable ex-husband has been accused of sexual misconduct—his culpability is fuzzy, think Aziz Ansari-level fuzzy—but the online discourse seeks to quickly dismiss him, and Bodie along with it. Makkai uses this B-plot to interrogate the main focus of the novel, illuminating the dangers of certainty.
I Have Some Questions For You is among Jo Firestone's five top laugh-out-loud mysteries, Jacqueline Faber's seven top thrillers about the role of the witness, Kat Davis's top ten feminist crime novels subverting the Dead Girl trope, Elise Juska’s eight best campus novels ever written, Nicole Hackett's six top mysteries about motherhood and crime, Brittany Bunzey's ten books that take you inside their characters’ heads, Anne Burt's four top recent titles with social justice themes, and Heather Darwent's nine best campus thrillers.
--Marshal Zeringue
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