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Thank you to NetGalley for letting me read an advance copy of this book in return for an honest review.

There are respectful ways of discussing rape and sexual assault, and of telling the stories of the victims and survivors of these kinds of events. This book fails greatly to meet my expectations in either arena.

Kennedy claims to write this book as a "history" of the rape kit, and of the woman who invented it, Marty Goddard. But she spends much of the book describing her own experiences of sexual assault in a way that makes this feel very much like trauma porn and adds absolutely nothing to the story she claims to be telling. One minute, you will be reading about the struggles and successes Goddard faced as a woman trying to make a difference in how rape victims are treated and the evidence of the crimes against them are handled; the next, you will be thrust into a random and incredibly graphic story about Kennedy talking on the phone with a pedophile who had claimed to be her doctor when she was a child, or being held down and tortured in a basement by the sons of her mother's friends as a young teenager.

She also praises a number of TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, or people who base their intolerance of transgender people on a hatred of men and a belief in "traditional" womanhood and the "divine" feminine, which is, at its roots, deeply misogynistic) organizations, and perpetuates the myths that men can't be raped and rape is an act of violence only used against women.

Even in the sections which do focus on Goddard's story, much of Kennedy's claims are largely based on speculation and heavily steeped in her own biases rather than actual evidence, which is unfortunately scant, as she admits. I will say that I'm grateful that she is at least somewhat aware of this, as she discusses multiple times her fantasies about herself and "Marty" (Kennedy unprofessionally insists on calling Goddard by her first name, stating that she believes them to be friends despite never having met, and Goddard being dead well before Kennedy even heard of her) bringing each other to justice, and Marty being a surrogate mother to her who would be better to her than her own mother, who Kennedy admits to shrugging off and putting away in a nursing home the moment she became inconvenient, while also, ironically, being horrified at the idea that someone might have put Marty in a nursing home.

While there is some excellent information present in this book about the history of forensics and sexual assault investigation, and of sexual assault care following the advent of the rape kit, it is, unfortunately, not enough to redeem this book in my eyes, or for me to ever recommend it to anyone. This is not a history of the rape kit, nor is it a biography of Marty Goddard; it is a story by a woman who, instead of going to therapy, obsessively catalogues her trauma and then releases it to the world under the guise of social justice.