Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich went to Harvard Law School, although she didn’t practice law long before she began writing full time. The title THE FACT OF A BODY, though, is based on something she learned as a first-year law student: (as I understand it and in my words, not hers) we have the fact of a child’s dead body. But where does the explanation, the story, for that dead body begin? Does it begin with that child entering his friend’s home and then being strangled? Or should the story begin sooner? A year sooner? Thirty years? Maybe even before the person who caused the death was born?

So Marzano-Lesnevich tells the story of both a murder and what led to the murder. That is, we learn of the murderer’s life and we learn, because this may be relevant, what happened before the murderer was born, even the circumstances of his mother’s pregnancy.

Should the story go back that far? Two different juries had to decide.

Interrmingled with these chapters about the murder and the murderer are chapters about Marzano-Lesnevich’s own life with a family that kept secrets in a home that was full of both pain and love. Throughout the book she compares her experiences and the inactions of her family members to the murderer and his story.

These comparisons are a stretch. Of course, pedophiles can be compared to each other. But it seems, to make that a book-length comparison, Marzano-Lesnevich compares her family members to the murderer’s.

These are the parts of the book that bored me. When Marzano-Lesnevich tries to compare her family life and the murderer’s, she seems to be trying too hard to make the two separate stories go together. Her effort is book length, though.

But THE FACT OF A BODY is probably TOO long. Worse than that, the book is haphazard, with both stories told first in one year, then another, sometimes back, sometimes back further, sometimes forward, up, over, etc. (“Up” and “over” are how it felt.)

Marzano-Lesnevich put together a book that might hove worked better if she left the comparison to her grandfather and the murderer. She could also cut out much of her irrelevant family life and try to keep to a timeline that is easier for the reader to keep track of.

Yet, this would be a good book for a book club. It would lead to lots of discussion and some may like it more than I did. This book already has plenty of great reviews.

I won an advance readers copy of THE FACT OF A BODY from the publisher, Flatiron Books.