Introduction

For the Stranger Than Fiction Unit in Humanities, I read the book The Borden Murders: Lizzie Borden and the Trial of the Century by Sarah Miller while managing to not die from boredom. The book is about a murder case that occurred in the city of Fall River during the late 19th century. Specifically, the murders of Andrew Borden and Abby Borden. The book talks about the murder itself, information collected on the case such as the testimonies given by key people, the legal processes of the case, and additional pieces of information. This book focuses especially on Lizzie Borden, the daughter of Andrew Borden and the main suspect of the crime.

My Notebook Pages

During the book club, I had to keep track of my thinking in my notebook. Here are some of my pages.

In this page, I compiled my evidence to support my claim that the enforcers of the law were very unprofessional during the Borden Murders. This page is the longest page I have, because the author seemed to really want to get that point across.

In this page, I focused on the other side of the story: the pieces of evidence that makes Lizzie Borden look suspicious. The central idea of this page is “Lizzie Borden was suspicious”, and I found lots of evidence to support that.

In this page, I looked at the information related to the newspapers, since the newspapers played a huge role by influencing the public’s opinion on the case. This notebook page is short because most information related to the newspapers of Fall River are presented as Fun Facts in the book.

Conclusion

I found this book rather repetitive and kind of boring, especially in the law-related sections of the book since not much happens in court. I would mostly recommend this book for research instead of casual reading, since it contains lots of information but does not feel interesting. Well, thanks for making it to the end of the post!