Our Take

Seventy Times Seven is the kind of book that reframes how you think about an entire system. Alex Mar — whose previous work includes Witches of America — brings the same immersive, deeply reported sensibility to a story rooted in the American criminal justice system at one of its most contested fault lines: juvenile sentencing and the death penalty. What makes this book exceptional isn't the crime itself, though Mar renders it with unflinching clarity. It's the aftermath — specifically, the strange and genuinely moving relationship that develops between Bill Pelke and Paula Cooper, two people connected by an act of violence that should have left no room for anything but grief and rage. Mar doesn't romanticize this. She interrogates it, and the result is a work that asks the reader to hold contradictions without resolving them neatly. The racial and economic dimensions of the case — Gary's history of white flight, the racialized optics of a Black teenager on death row for the murder of a white woman — are handled with the kind of care that avoids easy conclusions. Mar traces the case outward, showing how it became an unlikely international cause and a catalyst for broader debate about capital punishment. Readers who responded to Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy or Rachel Monroe's Savage Appetites will find this essential. It's a book about justice, but more than that, it's a book about what we're willing to risk when we choose empathy over certainty.