True Story

I have no idea what to think of this novel.

The story itself centers on the sexual assault of a teenage girl fifteen years earlier.

The book is such a jumble of ideas and styles. I don't know if it's wonderfully brilliant or dreadfully pretentious. The story takes on multiple points of view. It's a thriller, a campy horror novel, a memoir, and more. It uses found documents, parts of the novel are comprised entirely of emails or extremely juvenile plays written by our characters as children. There's a lack of believability throughout these stories that begs the question, Is this a nod to victims of sexual assault? And yet, on its surface, this book seems potentially offensive on multiple fronts, including toward those same victims of sexual assault.

So I don't know what to think. But I do think this is exactly the kind of book readers can get lost talking about with others. Love it or hate it. Think it brilliant or simple, empowering or degrading. You'll probably have feelings about this one, one way or another.

This “review” is part of a series in which I quickly scribble a few of the thoughts I had regarding a book I read in the first half of 2021 during a time when I let my reviews get very behind.