SuitabookThis Book Kills
Ravena Guron
- Reading
- Check whether the reader is comfortable with murder, threats and references to graphic injury before starting. Afterwards, discuss how humour and suspense sit alongside class, race, gender and responsibility.
- Themes
- Privilege and belonging: Jess attends an elite school on a scholarship and navigates wealthier, mostly white classmates while investigating the murder. The story uses Jess’s outsider perspective to examine privilege, entitlement and unequal belonging rather than treating the school as socially neutral.
- Guilt and responsibility: The murder prompts suspicion, blame and questions about how people can present contrasting sides of themselves. The narrative appears to complicate simple judgements by considering guilt, culpability and the possibility that a person may seem both caring and harmful.
- Treatment of young women: The story considers how young women are treated and perceived within a school community alongside romantic betrayal and suspicion. The book presents this mainly as information or explanation.
- Worth knowing
- The murder investigation includes a dead pupil, threats, fear, bullying, blackmail and references to graphic injury. Racism, classism, sexism and unequal treatment are also identified; the ending includes a murderer’s revelation.