A touching novel, masterfully constructed. A thirteen-year-old girl witnesses events that she incompletely understands, and gives testimony that ruins lives. The novel is her atonement for her sins.
How long has it been since I got choked up reading a novel? It's a powerful story, and expertly written. A novel within a novel, since the principal character is writing an account of what happened in the form of a novel in order to ease her own conscience. It concludes with an epilogue that brings things into the present and wraps up the story, one of the few epilogues I have ever read that was effective. In a sense it reminds me of another excellent novel with a similar form, Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin.
It does have a slow start - we are halfway through the novel before we get to the defining incident. Because of that I think I did not have a good sense of what kind of novel I was reading. Was it a comedy of errors? A romance? A coming of age? But that's my fault, my critical examination of the novel as I read it, my desire to categorize other writer's fiction so that I can understand them. It's possible I missed the dark tone early which would have given me the clue. It's a tragedy.
Extraordinary novel, well worth a read.
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