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Naturally, the week I'm gearing up to try Nanowrimo again, a bunch of books on my TBR list come in at the library. So I'm planning and scheming and reading as fast as I can. The one I just finished was All the Truth That's in Me, by Julie Berry. And wow. It was a powerful book.
Set in an unidentified colonial-type setting, Judith is the girl who went missing along with another girl--for two years. The other girl turned up dead. Judith came home with her throat cut. She can't speak, can't explain, and of course everything thinks she's damaged goods. She's been in love with a boy named Lucas her whole life, but what would he want with her now? Still, when invaders come, she leads Lucas to a stash of gunpowder hidden where she spent those years. She doesn't want him or her brother or anyone else to die undefended. It's to this Lucas that the story is told, by the way. Second person present, hardly a common narrative choice, but it works very well in this book.
This is one of those books that grabs you by the guts when you read it--we see everything Judith does that's right, and all the ways that people twist it to make it seem wrong. The tension runs high in the book, and the full truth of everything isn't something I predicted from the beginning.
I've read other books by Berry, but this one is her nothing-held-back best.
Set in an unidentified colonial-type setting, Judith is the girl who went missing along with another girl--for two years. The other girl turned up dead. Judith came home with her throat cut. She can't speak, can't explain, and of course everything thinks she's damaged goods. She's been in love with a boy named Lucas her whole life, but what would he want with her now? Still, when invaders come, she leads Lucas to a stash of gunpowder hidden where she spent those years. She doesn't want him or her brother or anyone else to die undefended. It's to this Lucas that the story is told, by the way. Second person present, hardly a common narrative choice, but it works very well in this book.
This is one of those books that grabs you by the guts when you read it--we see everything Judith does that's right, and all the ways that people twist it to make it seem wrong. The tension runs high in the book, and the full truth of everything isn't something I predicted from the beginning.
I've read other books by Berry, but this one is her nothing-held-back best.
