title: Before You Knew My Name
author: Jacqueline Bublitz
summary: this is a story about two women, Alice is an 18 year old looking for a fresh start in New York, Ruby is in her mid thirties and decides to take a leap and move to New York to start over. She's barely had the chance to settle in when she finds a woman's body out on a run. She doesn't know yet that the woman's name was Alice, or that she was going to be completely unable to forget about "Jane Doe" until she can help uncover her story.
my thoughts: this is a beautiful and sad story which is narrated from Alice's perspective. Even though you know from the very start that Alice winds up murdered, you can help but root for her. By the end of this book I was emotional and I was devastated, because you want to have hope for Alice and her new start and the man who gives her a place to stay and a start and a dog to walk for a job. I wish I could forget this book and start it again, it was so hard to stop reading and when I was done I just felt myself pause, and I thought about it for a long while after.
notable passage: There is no name to be spoken, but I am recognised by each of the women present, clasped around their lifted hands, heavy on their hearts. I am their fears, their lucky escapes, their anger, and their weariness. I am their caution and their yesterdays, the shadow version of themselves all those nights they have spent looking over shoulders or twining keys between fingers. A man speaks to the crowd, entreats his gender to do better; people clap, cheer, but it is the silence of the women that binds up the candlelight, sends it skyward, a flare in search of every lost sister. So that when the man's passion is spent, it is the quiet rage of women that lingers, can be seen, glittering, from above.
