Hell's Half Acre - Review

Author: Susan Jonusas

Genre: True Crime

Format: Audiobook

Time: 9 Hours

This was a mixed bag for me because there were parts about this book I really liked, but toward the middle of the book, it started to feel like this book would never end. Maybe it was the audiobook version that made it feel like, nine hours for a book that's just three hundred and sixty-eight pages. Toward the end, this book felt like a chore, and I had to make myself finish it. All of these really disappointed me because I'm from Southeast Kansas and I grew up on the Bender Family stories. So I was really excited about this book.

So let's start with what I really liked about this book. First, I loved how much history was in this book. I grew up in one of the towns mentioned in Hell's Half-Acre and I learned a lot of things I hadn't previously known. Not even just about my hometown, but towns I've been to a dozen times. So I really enjoyed that part. This continues throughout the book with each new region we follow the Bender Family too. It was kind of fun to think about these small little towns that were once bustling cities back then. 

I even liked that we got a feel for the landscape back then, not much as changed really when you get out of the farming communities, but the roads are paved now. And, while I grew up there, having those descriptions for the readers that have never been to the Middle of the USA, or even to this country. I thought it was great. I'm sure the physical copy even had pictures. So it was nice to see Jonsusas add these to the story she was telling about the Benders. To give an idea of isolated everything was, how hard it was for news to spread, or even communicate to anyone, not within a hundred miles of you. It sets a great scene for what this family did.

I also really like that Jonsusas did her best to tell the story of the victims of this family. Which had to be hard to piece together. However, this was where things started to stretch for me and get long. Each person connected to this case got a backstory, and I love that we were able to get to know the victims. We also got a deep dive into some of their families, and at times this was where the book seemed to slide from the story a little. Because with the audiobook it felt like we have taken a sharp left turn with no warning, and I have to stop to try to catch up with the story. Eventually, it would all connect together in the end, but occasionally I had forgotten we'd gotten that backstory in the first place.

Toward the middle of the book, it started to feel like an information dump with all the facts we started to get thrown at us, and I was having a hard time keeping up. At first, I thought it was because I was reading at work while I was multi-tasking trying to open. So I started listening in the morning with breakfast and at night when doing household chores, same problem. It was a lot of information just coming out of me, and I didn't always know how it was connected.

Here is where I wonder if this problem was because I had the audiobook and not the physical book. So there was no way to backtrack. But I also kind of feel like there should have been a way to tell this story without having to flip back a hundred pages to refresh myself on what happened. It might also be that I didn't just marathon this book, I read it over the course of a couple of weeks. Again lots of people do this.

In the end, it's a solidly researched book that does a good job of telling not just the story of the Bender Family, but the people they murdered while living in Southeast Kansas. While this book wasn't exactly for me, I wouldn't tell people interested in the history of these murders not to pick up. Just to maybe pick up a book or ebook version instead of the audio.

HAPPY READING!!