Testimony by Anita Shreve

Testimony by Anita Shreve
Fiction

When the headmaster of Avery Private School receives a tape from one of his faculty members, he knows it's not going to be good news. It winds up showing three members of the basketball team having sexual relations with an underage girl. The book slowly unwinds the story in to the past and in to the future to show what events happened to bring those three boys and girl to the room that night and make the biggest mistakes of their lives.

The story is mostly told from the perspective of three people: Mike the headmaster, Silas one of the boys involved in the scandal, and Noelle, his girlfriend. Mike tells the reader at the beginning of the novel what happened as a result of the controversy and then all of the narratives piece it together. Some of the narratives I found weren't required. For example, the person from the newspaper. I didn't feel like I learned anything from that piece so I'm not sure what the purpose of it was.

There wasn't really anything surprising about this book but it was still an interesting read. It's amazing how a single event, in this case some black ice on a road that caused an accident, could set off such a chain of events.

First Line: "It was a small cassette, not much bigger than the palm of his hand, and when Mike thought about the terrible license and risk exhibited on the tape, as well as its resultant destructive power, it was as though the two-by-three plastic package had been radioactive."

Rating:
(3.5/5)