YA Book Review: No Saints in Kansas by Amy Brashear

No Saints in Kansas by Amy Brashear

There have been a lot of Young Adult books that re-tell classic stories in the last few years. Here is one that isn’t a fairy tale retelling; instead, No Saints in Kansas reworks Truman Capote’s famous book, In Cold Blood.

Capote’s classic essentially created the true-crime genre, and tells the story of how the Clutter family was brutally murdered in their farm house in rural western Kansas in 1959.

Author Amy Brashear has taken the real-life characters depicted in Capote’s non-fiction book and told the story from high schooler Carly Fleming’s point of view.

Carly’s father is an attorney who recently moved his family to town from Manhattan (New York, not Kansas), and Carly is still an outsider in the small town high school. She had made friends with both Nancy Clutter and Nancy’s boyfriend Bobby Rupp. When Nancy and her family are murdered, Bobby becomes a suspect since he was the last person to see the family alive.

When Carly’s dad represents the accused murderers, Carly feels completely cut off from any friendships at school and is ostracized in town -- but she’s determined to help solve the case in her friend’s memory. She seems to do more harm than good, though, as she seems to be constantly meddling in the police investigation. From a narrative standpoint, Carly's attempts at solving the crime help the reader get updates on how the actual police investigation was progressing. But the meddling is a distraction, and most readers will question how security could possibly be so lacking at police headquarters, even in what we seems like a much simpler time of 1959.

Several celebrities make brief -- and surprising for such a small town -- appearances in the novel, including John F. Kennedy, who is a college friend of Carly's mother, Truman Capote and his childhood friend, Harper Lee, who students will recognize as the author of the freshman curriculum standard To Kill A Mockingbird.

What Brashears, a first time novelist, does well in this book is to portray Carly's sense of frustration and powerlessness in the face of her friend's murder, and in the general suspicion of Bobby. Teens will likely relate and empathize with Carly's growing social isolation and her desire to go back to the big city life she'd known very recently. However, the novel has a lot of issues that are hard to overcome. The celebrity appearances could be plausible, but seem like more of a distraction. The lack of security at police headquarters and the crime scene, while benefitting the overall narration, leave the reader thinking that nothing could ever really be that easy, even in 1959. 

Perhaps the biggest thing working against Amy Brashear in No Saints in Kansas is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. One is a classic work of non-fiction storytelling and research, the other is a lackluster attempt to introduce a nearly sixty year old crime to  modern high school students. That's not to say teens won't enjoy No Saints in Kansas. I bought four total copies for the library (including eBooks) based on reviews. Perhaps I was expecting Capote's prose, or perhaps I simply had my hopes up. Regardless, I was disappointed.

I recommend reading Capote’s classic first, then pair it with No Saints in Kansas as a way to compare.