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A review by ridgewaygirl
True Story by Kate Reed Petty
5.0
I wrote it my own way. I made it a thriller, a horror, a memoir, a noir. I used my college essays, emails and other found documents to ground the story in truth--they're the closest thing I have to "evidence," proof that my memories, however few, are real.
What does it mean when the worst happens and you can't remember it? A drunk teen-age girl is given a lift home by two members of the lacrosse team. She only found out what happened in the car because the boys bragged about it. A man goes to an isolated mountain cabin for a final bender before he gives up drinking, for real this time. He doesn't know how the accident happened, but he'll carry the evidence of it with him for the rest of his life. A wealthy entrepreneur hires a woman to ghost write his motivational self-help book.
Kate Reed Petty uses the tropes of different genres and a variety of characters to explore memory and how an event can shape a life even if the person doesn't remember what happened. I enjoy novels that use the conventions of genre to dig more deeply than genre usually permits, and this one was so well done. There's a central story that emerges and as the different seemingly disparate threads come together, the novel twists into different things as it goes. There are screenplays written by middle-schoolers, emails, and sections that fall into different genres, that combine to form a cohesive, and very interesting whole. I'll be thinking about this one for some time to come.
What does it mean when the worst happens and you can't remember it? A drunk teen-age girl is given a lift home by two members of the lacrosse team. She only found out what happened in the car because the boys bragged about it. A man goes to an isolated mountain cabin for a final bender before he gives up drinking, for real this time. He doesn't know how the accident happened, but he'll carry the evidence of it with him for the rest of his life. A wealthy entrepreneur hires a woman to ghost write his motivational self-help book.
Kate Reed Petty uses the tropes of different genres and a variety of characters to explore memory and how an event can shape a life even if the person doesn't remember what happened. I enjoy novels that use the conventions of genre to dig more deeply than genre usually permits, and this one was so well done. There's a central story that emerges and as the different seemingly disparate threads come together, the novel twists into different things as it goes. There are screenplays written by middle-schoolers, emails, and sections that fall into different genres, that combine to form a cohesive, and very interesting whole. I'll be thinking about this one for some time to come.