The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia
BY EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG
I really wanted to like this book. It started out so great, it seemed, giving a history of West Virginia and the people there. I learned a lot I didn’t know, and as I was reading it, it seemed that this was a foundation for the story of the murders of two young girls that took place there years ago, and the third “Rainbow Girl” who made it out alive.
What a disappointment. First of all, the book is definitely inaptly named. There was next to nothing in the book about the third girl traveling to the annual Rainbow peace and love gathering, the girl who didn’t get killed. And rightly so. She had nothing to do with the murders, she barely knew the girls who were killed, and she left them before any tragedy occurred. Why name the book for her?
The book bounced from a convoluted story about the murder investigation/trials that went on for years, to more about West Virginia (a lot about the snow), and primarily to a huge portion of the book about the author herself and her time spent in West Virginia.
All in all, the book seemed like it was crying out to just be a memoir, using the “true crime” tag to draw readers in. There were pages and pages and pages ad nauseam about every bit of minutiae in the author’s life, from who she slept with to what she drank, how often she drank, where she drank, and how often she watched fingers strumming bluegrass tunes. None of it had any bearing on the Rainbow murders. The topper, to me, was when, out of the blue, she describes how she was so frustrated one day that she threw her cat against the wall and then locked him up for hours with no food. What??!!
I don’t know why I finished this book. I actually didn’t, really, because for approximately the last 15-20% of the story I skimmed the pages, looking for words to jump out at me that might have some bearing on what I thought was the point of the story. All I found were interviews with the same people that had with investigated or been investigated or knew someone who had been investigated about the murders.
Thank you to NetGalley and Hatchette Books for an ARC in exchange for my honest review. I’m sorry it was a brutal one.
House of Black and Blue 