Uninnocent

One of Buzzfeed''s 25 New And Upcoming Books You Won’t Be Able To Put Down and one of LitHub''s Best New Nonfiction to Read This NovemberThe Uninnocent is so elegantly crafted that the pleasure of reading it nearly overrides its devastating subject matter . . . a story of radical empathy a triumph of care and forgiveness. --Stephanie Danler author of Stray and SweetbitterA harrowing intellectual reckoning with crime mercy justice and heartbreak through the lens of a murder. On a Thursday morning in June 2010 Katharine Blake''s sixteen-year-old cousin walked to a nearby bike path with a boxcutter and killed a young boy he didn’t know. It was a psychological break that tore through his brain and into the hearts of those who loved both boys―one brutally killed the other sentenced to die at Angola one of the country’s most notorious prisons.. In The Uninnocent Blake a law student at Stanford at the time of the crime wrestles with the implications of her cousin’s break as well as the broken machinations of America’s justice system. As her cousin languished in a cell on death row where he was assigned for his own protection Blake struggled to keep her faith in the system she was training to join. . Consumed with understanding her family’s new reality Blake became obsessed with heartbreak seeing it everywhere: in her cousin’s isolation in the loss at the center of the crime in the students she taught at various prisons in the way our justice system breaks rather than mends in the history of her parents and their violent childhoods. As she delves into a history of heartbreak―through science medicine and literature―and chronicles the uneasy yet ultimately tender bond she forms with her cousin Blake asks probing questions about justice faith inheritance family and most of all mercy. . Sensitive singular and powerful effortlessly bridging memoir essay and legalese The Uninnocent is a reckoning with the unimaginable unforgettable and seemly irredeemable. With curiosity and vulnerability Blake unravels a distressed tapestry finding solace in both its tearing and its mending.