{"id":1276,"date":"2022-03-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-30T20:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=1276"},"modified":"2024-12-31T09:25:09","modified_gmt":"2024-12-30T20:25:09","slug":"notes-on-an-execution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2022\/03\/18\/notes-on-an-execution\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes on an Execution"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><strong>Danya Kukafka<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><em>Hachette<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\">Otago Daily Times, March 18th 2022<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Ansel Packer, psychopath, murderer, and death row inmate, has a Theory: <em>\u201cIf morality is determined by our choices, then we must also consider those universes in which we\u2019ve made different ones\u2026They prove that who I am \u2013 my goodness or my badness \u2013 it\u2019s fluctuating.\u201d<\/em> The corollary is that killers are made, not born, an idea that Danya Kukafka explores in her challenging sophomore novel. The story details the final twelve hours of Ansel\u2019s life as his hopes for recognition and exoneration fade and he comes to terms with who and what he is. But the heart of the story belongs to three women \u2013 the mother forced to abandon him a lifetime earlier, the sister of his murdered wife, and the detective who brought him to justice \u2013 whose lives intersect tragically with Ansel\u2019s own. His fate is determined by their choices just as theirs are by his, and we are tempted to empathise with the condemned man (whose sections are written in the second person, unlike the close third person of the rest of the novel) even as he undermines his own case. Kukafka\u2019s taut and careful plotting ensures we remain ambivalent until the very end<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Danya Kukafka Hachette Otago Daily Times, March 18th 2022 Ansel Packer, psychopath, murderer, and death row inmate, has a Theory: \u201cIf morality is determined by our choices, then we must also consider those universes in which we\u2019ve made different ones\u2026They prove that who I am \u2013 my goodness or my badness \u2013 it\u2019s fluctuating.\u201d The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[381,386,370,18],"class_list":["post-1276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-381","tag-danya-kukafka","tag-fiction","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1276"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1277,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1276\/revisions\/1277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}