CBR17 Bingo: Citizen – Though Cora is a citizen of the United States, her race – as well as the race of the many murdered Asian women in this book – makes everyone around them perceive them as foreigners to the point that they are stripped of the safety that their citizenships were supposed to have given them.
Cora works as a crime scene cleaner during the COVID-19 pandemic – after witnessing her sister pushed in front of a train, the gore doesn’t bother her anymore. But when her team starts cleaning up after more and more Asian women and bite marks start appearing on her coffee table, even Cora can’t ignore that something is terribly wrong.
This book is bleak and gory and has scenes that would translate excellently to the screen – certain chapters were literal jump-scares! The various ghost stories threaded through the narrative are eerie and sad and haunting. But in a lot of ways the supernatural horror is less frightening than the racism that Cora and her friends face, which is exacerbated, as it was in real life, by it being the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. And I thought the author did a great job of bringing the ghost town feel of New York City in this time to life.
However, I had trouble with getting a proper grasp on Cora’s character. She’s clearly struggled with her mental health all her life, and one way in which it comes out is her passivity, which is realistic for so depressed a character but doesn’t necessarily make for a dynamic character. The issue really is that it’s tough to separate her from her mental illness, to get a sense of who she is beyond it. Pair her with more defined, interesting supporting characters and you really feel that difference.
Also, while the solution to the serial murders thematically made plenty of sense, for some reason my suspension of disbelief was not quite elastic enough to embrace it. Probably because I read too much true crime and know too much about how serial killers work.