《The Borden Murders:  Lizzie Borden & The Trial of the century》By Sarah Miller is the story of how Lizzie Borden was charged, imprisoned, and trialed for possibly the most bizarre murders and trials in American history.  The double homicide of her parents. The story unfolds from a narrator’s perspective, taking readers from the final moments of the wealthy and prestigious couple to the climactic declaration of Lizzie’s fate by the jury. With meticulous detail, the book explores the step-by-step investigation of the gruesome crime and the subsequent trial. Scan through the pages and discover her fate.

Here are my notebook pages and how I slowly smoothed out my thoughts and gained a profound understanding of the book. 🙂

The first central idea I came upon was Many will come to conclusions based off appearance rather than evidence or truth.  I came to this after branching a broad storyline mindmap.

As I delved deeper into the book and continued reading, I encountered many extra examples aimed and supporting my central idea, but furthermore, a new and longer-lasting central idea started to form. Rumors, lies, and judgments based on appearance can affect a person negatively. Here are some examples I think that links in:

In the next few lessons, we started to pay attention to making connections in different parts of the story. Here, a short passage in the intro now perfectly aligns with my central idea, I was thrilled when I found this connection but also realized how strong the negative effect of rumors was; it was made evident right from the beginning of the story.  Here is how I organized my thinking:

Following my deepened understanding of the horrendous impact Lizzie Borden went through. In the antepenultimate class, I had the opportunity to clearly outline and analyze how the rumors had a specific detrimental effect on her. Here are my discoveries:

The most that common object that came up over and over was how the 3 biggest Boston newspapers were to blame for the exaggerated amount of negative attention and even straight-up lying about the case to make a few more pennies. On page 146 Boston Globes’ rival Boston Herald brought to light the fact that the Globes had “ASSAULT ON MISS BORDEN’S HONOR IS PURELY A MYTH” Boston Globes has reported the falsehood that Lizzie Borden was engaged in incest, stealing and murder without even the slightest proof. The widespread nature of such news forever damaged Miss Lizzie’s reputation.  After learning about this incident, I became intrigued and conducted some research on the two newspapers:

Thank you for reading to the end of this blog.  I enjoyed this book, mainly due to my passion for true crime and detective stories. I would recommend this book to people who are also intrigued by the justice system and how murders take place.