About this Book

The Uninnocent: A Harrowing Reckoning with Crime, Mercy, and Heartbreak

"The Uninnocent is so elegantly crafted that the pleasure of reading it nearly overrides its devastating subject matter . . . a story of radical empathy, a triumph of care and forgiveness." --Stephanie Danler, author of Stray and Sweetbitter

In June 2010, Katharine Blake's sixteen-year-old cousin walked to a nearby bike path with a boxcutter and killed a young boy he didn't know. It was a psychological break that tore through his brain and the hearts of those who loved both boys—one brutally killed, the other sentenced to die at Angola, one of the country's most notorious prisons.

In The Uninnocent, Blake, a law student at Stanford at the time of the crime, wrestles with the implications of her cousin's break and the broken machinations of America's justice system. As her cousin languished on death row, Blake struggled to keep her faith in the system she was training to join.

Consumed with understanding her family's new reality, Blake became obsessed with heartbreak, seeing it everywhere: in her cousin's isolation, in the loss at the center of the crime, in the students she taught at various prisons, in the way our justice system breaks rather than mends, and in her own family history. As she delves into the science, medicine, and literature of heartbreak and chronicles the tender bond she forms with her cousin, Blake asks probing questions about justice, faith, inheritance, and, most of all, mercy.

Sensitive, singular, and powerful, The Uninnocent is a reckoning with the unimaginable, unforgettable, and seemingly irredeemable. With curiosity and vulnerability, Blake unravels a distressed tapestry, finding solace in both its tearing and mending.