Reams of paper have been wasted on this trial.  This and Raffaele Sollecito’s books are the only ones you “need” to read.  The rest are just full of idle speculation and rumor.  At the same time this book should never have been written.  Ms. Knox should have been off doing whatever it was she wanted to do after her year of Study Abroad in Italy.  Still we all know what happened.

For those of you that are still “on the fence” about Amanda’s culpability, well you must still believe the earth is only 6,000 years old and that the jury is still out on Galileo.  There was never ever a shred of evidence that Knox or Sollecito committed any crime whatsoever and an overeager media, public, police, and a prosecutor literally bent on a 17th century witch trial ended up taking one tragedy and trying to make it into three, the lone perpetrator safely ensconced behind bars for most of the time this mess went on.  The fact that Knox and Sollecito were both attractive and Knox American, strangely, or maybe not so, worked against them.

The writing isn’t great, but how can it be and stick to the facts?  There is enough mystery and suspense and truly bizarre hijinks without any authorial tricks.  It reads more like testimony than biography and doesn’t always convey what a fiction writer could have added to make the narrative a little more exciting at times.  Still, this wasn’t the writer’s goal and at times the necessity to reveal in detail certain personal details that should quite rightly have remained private can still make the (sane) reader squirm.

There are the usual superfluous photographs that we’ve all seen a million times, but at least Knox could pick out the pose this time.

I hope she and Raffaele make scads of filthy lucre off the affair, enough to never worry about money to at least make up for some of the misery and the loss of some of the best years of their lives.

I also hope somebody also remembers Meredith Kercher and her sad and terrifying violation and murder at the hands of some Ivory Coast drifter.  That’s what we should have been talking about the whole time.