The Virgin Suicides meets Little Fires Everywhere: inspired by a true story, this haunting novel pieces together a chorus of voices to explore the aftermath of a college student’s death.
On a cold day in 1997, student Sara Morgan was killed in the woods surrounding her liberal arts college in upstate New York. Her boyfriend, Blake Campbell, confessed, only to be acquitted following a plea of temporary insanity.
In the wake of this senseless act of violence, the case comes to haunt a strange and surprising network of community members, from the young woman who discovers Sara’s body to the junior reporter whose convinced there’s a connection to convicted local serial killer John Logan.
As the years pass, others search for retribution or explanation, including Sara’s half-sister who, stifled by her family’s silence about Blake, poses as a babysitter and seeks out her own form of justice, and the teenager Sara used to babysit, who begins writing to Logan as part of a class project.
Despite what the premise might suggest, Nicola Maye Goldberg’s fascinating new novel, Nothing Can Hurt You, is not so much a thriller as a character-study. The reader learns who the victim and killer are by the end of the first chapter, and though our brains have been hardwired as crime-fiction readers to follow other leads and search for possible answers – there are none. Instead, the focus of the novel is not the case itself, but the way in which this one tragic event has a ripple effect on so many different lives.
Each chapter is told from the point of view of someone whose life – either directly or indirectly – was connected to Sara’s. Goldberg dives deep into the psyche of each of these loosely connected narrators to unearth their flaws, strengths and darkest desires, as well as explore the extent to which their lives were altered when Sara’s ended.
Another part of the novel’s allure is the way in which it subverts the tropes of the popular “dead girl” sub-genre of crime-fiction. Unlike her predecessors within this genre, Sara is portrayed as a fully fleshed out human being with her own voice and complexities – and not just another beautiful and mysterious corpse who functions more as a prop or set piece rather than an actual person.
Nothing Can Hurt You is a unique, hard-hitting and edgy read that reeled me in from page one. It’s also surprisingly funny, and I found myself laughing aloud more than once at the dark streak of humour that runs through the story. If you’re looking for a thriller that breathes new life into the genre, you should definitely add Nothing Can Hurt You to your TBR pile. You won’t be disappointed.
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