Amanda Knox's mediocre text and narrative performance result in a disappointing final product. Her inability to establish a defined persona makes for an uneven presentation as she vacillates between assertiveness and naïveté. The few times she attempts to show strong emotion by elevating pitch and intensity sound forced. She comes across as disingenuous as she blames her overly trusting nature for her arrest, trial, and conviction for the murder of her British roommate while the young women were students in Italy. There are certainly interesting bits, especially her insights into Italy's legal and penal systems. But Knox comes across as an unsympathetic figure whose total focus is on herself—to the virtual exclusion of any discussion of her brutally murdered friend. Her memoir leaves many questions unanswered. M.O.B. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
Jennifer duBois, author of A Partial History of Lost Causes, has written a new novel, and it’s a doozy. Cartwheel, which tells a fictionalized version of the Amanda Knox story, is a literary page-turner and a deeply imagined character study. It centers around Lily, a smart but naive protagonist who’s studying abroad in Buenos Aires […]
Even those who doubt Knox’s innocence can’t deny that she was unfairly villainized. The police and press stole and misinterpreted her journals, bugged her, twisted her words, and spread lies. (For example, it was reported that receipts proved she bought bleach after the murder, but the receipts were actually from before the crime, and were […]