60 pages • 2 hours read
Stacey AbramsWhile Justice Sleeps
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Stacey Abrams
The author of While Justice Sleeps, Abrams is a US politician and lawyer with a background in tax law. A Democrat, Abrams served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 2007 to 2017. While Justice Sleeps critiques the corrupt nature of American politics and its manifestations in the interplay between politics and businesses as well as between politics and the media. The author’s experience in Washington, DC, politics and her firsthand knowledge of the criminal-justice system is apparent in her work, which makes the content of the book more troubling, leaving the reader to wonder what may be rooted in fact versus what is fiction.
Abrams’s work as a lawyer is also useful in helping to elucidate the intricacies of the judicial system for the reader throughout the book. For example, there are details regarding appeals processes and Supreme Court terms that laymen may not know. Abrams is careful to explicate these details in the work through various techniques, such as conversations between characters and portrayals of media reports.
Historical Context: The Partition of India
The driving plot point in While Justice Sleeps has direct roots to real-world socio-political/national/geographic tensions. The book’s action revolves around a shocking point of corruption: The US president approved illegal government funding of genetic research aimed to produce a deadly genetic virus targeting Muslim people. While the book’s portrayal of biogenetic warfare is fiction, the context for the motivation behind this genetic research in the book is true.
Jared Wynn elucidates this real-life background succinctly: “Pakistan and India were one country until the British partitioned it in 1947. Hindus in India and Muslims in the newly created Pakistan” (196). Drawing geopolitical lines like this has created tensions in real life, as India’s Muslim people have been marginalized, an issue that continues to this day (see Maizland Lindsay. “India’s Muslims: An Increasingly Marginalized Population.” Council on Foreign Relations, 14 July 2022). Meanwhile, extremists in India have claimed that the Muslim population is growing and will erase the Hindu population to create an Islamic state. This kind of radical language and the concept of demographic erasure creates fear and violence (see Kasturi, Charu. “The Truth Behind Indian Extremists’ Anti-Muslim ‘Great Replacement Theory.’” The Guardian, 30 May 2022). The reality of the book’s historic context—the partition of India and the tensions this has created between its Muslim and Hindu populations—makes the fictional plotline of While Justice Sleeps more troubling, making one wonder, “Could this really happen?”
Genre Context: Legal Thriller
While Justice Sleeps is a legal thriller and upholds many relevant genre traits. There is a mystery set up at the start of the book; an unprepared protagonist thrust into the “detective” role (Avery); and life-threatening danger as the protagonist pursues the answers to the mystery. Further, the book includes many plot twists and consistently elevates narrative tension, in keeping with the thriller genre. Finally, While Justice Sleeps ends with a shocking, action-packed court scene, full of unexpected revelations, another common conceit of legal thrillers.
The legal thriller is a particularly fraught genre for Abrams, given that her real-world experience in the courtroom could allow her to point fingers at contemporary figures in American politics by using thinly veiled characters to represent them. She also has an intimate knowledge of the complex and often slow machinations of the judiciary system and could take this work of fiction as an opportunity to explore its nuances in depth for a reader well versed in it. However, she chooses the tack of making the processes of law relatively clear and simplified for the reader to reach a broader audience. Notably—given her own high-stakes political campaigns—she keeps the novel rather apolitical as well. Her characters may be motivated by greed, devoid of empathy, and unscrupulous in terms of the long-term consequences of their actions on a social scale, but they are not easily slotted into partisan boxes and could belong to either major political party. This is common in legal thrillers, allowing the reader to weigh different sides of complex moral issues and explore intricate legal puzzles without being swayed by party affiliation—and, again, maintaining appeal to a broader audience.
