Review: Testimony by Anita Shreve

Moving really does wonders for my reading and nothing for my knitting.  I haven't picked up a knitted object in three weeks...but I'm tearing through my books.  All three of the books I picked up at Goodwill last Thursday are things of the past now.  And I've loved every single one of them.  I'm dropping off some donations at GW tonight, and you bet I'll be checking out the book section again.

Testimony, by Anita Shreve, reads like a Quentin Tarantino film.  When you begin the book, the main event has already occurred.  A Vermont prep school is at the center of a sex scandal that has spiraled out of control.  Worse still are the teenagers at the center of it -- three basketball players, one the quiet child of a local farmer, and an underage girl.  The story is told by the points of view of those involved -- the teenagers involved, their roommates, their parents, their teammates, and even the headmaster of the school, who has had his own part to play in the scandal that has torn the school, and the town of Avery, Vermont, into pieces.

As I stated in my Book-Related Pet Peeves post a few days ago, I'm not usually a fan of books where there are multiple first-person POVs.  But Anita Shreve does this masterfully, like Jodi Picoult in My Sister's Keeper.  I didn't have too much confusion with the characters.  The book also shows, not tells, the bleakness of the main characters following the events chronicled in Testimony, but in a surprising twist, not in the way I expected at all.

This is my first Anita Shreve book, but I plan on reading some of her other work in the future.  Definitely good contemporary literature.

Rating: ****