A Murder Over a Girl, Ken Corbett
A Murder Over a Girl, Ken Corbett
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A Murder Over a Girl
Justice, Gender, Junior High

Author: Ken Corbett

Narrator: Ken Corbett

Unabridged: 10 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/01/2016


Synopsis

A psychologist's gripping, troubling, and moving exploration of the brutal murder of a possibly transgender middle school student by an eighth grade classmate

On Feb. 12, 2008, at E. O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, CA, 14-year-old Brandon McInerney shot and killed his classmate, Larry King, who had recently begun to call himself "Leticia" and wear makeup and jewelry to school.

Profoundly shaken by the news, and unsettled by media coverage that sidestepped the issues of gender identity and of race integral to the case, psychologist Ken Corbett traveled to LA to attend the trial. As visions of victim and perpetrator were woven and unwoven in the theater of the courtroom, a haunting picture emerged not only of the two young teenagers, but also of spectators altered by an atrocity and of a community that had unwittingly gestated a murder. Drawing on firsthand observations, extensive interviews and research, as well as on his decades of academic work on gender and sexuality, Corbett holds each murky facet of this case up to the light, exploring the fault lines of memory and the lacunae of uncertainty behind facts. Deeply compassionate, and brimming with wit and acute insight, A Murder Over a Girl is a riveting and stranger-than-fiction drama of the human psyche.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Garrett

I wanted this book to be better than it was. It's good, and a searing look at LGBT violence, hatred, guns, and kids of a certain age and how completely fucked as a group our attitudes toward most of these things are, and how far into the cocked hat things go when they're all combined into one case.......more

Goodreads review by Jason

Devastating. Gender, cultural, racial and socioeconomic concerns aside, this is an incredibly tragic story of one deeply messed up kid murdering an equally messed up kid and a community's utter failure at understanding the event in any sort of meaningful way. Essentially the book deals with how the......more

~ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review~ Ken Corbett recounts the 2008/2011 trial of Brandon McInerney for shooting his 15-year-old classmate Larry King during their middle-school English class in 2008. He analyses the shooter, Brandon, chronicling the events of the courtroom as t......more