Will I love Little Deaths?

I found this novel incredibly chilling and scarily relevant to today, given its 1965 setting. Inspired by true events, Flint’s spare prose totally transported me to the blistering New York heatwave in which her character, Ruth, is accused of murdering her own children.

I love how complicated Ruth is, how her story asked me to question what makes a ‘good’ mother, and how deeply Flint left me thinking about how women, in general, are judged by the police, the press, and the public.

Flint’s novel combines literary fiction with the darkness of true crime and draws its inspiration from the 1965 Alice Crimmins case in Queens, NY. Her own small children disappeared from home, later found dead. The prosecution portrayed Crimmins as a woman with poor morals. An all-male jury convicted her on thin circumstantial evidence. Flint’s chronicle of the case is heartbreaking and perfectly evokes the time period.