The Truth According to Us

Multiple narrators offer range and textural interest to this involving story of redemption in the Great Depression. When Layla Beck refuses to marry the man chosen by her father-the-senator, she ends up in tiny Macedonia, West Virginia, boarding with a local family as she writes up the town's history on behalf of the Federal Writers' Project. The complications that ensue are told by many people, including the family's 8-year-old daughter, a 50-something factory manager, and Layla herself. Core narrators Ann Marie Lee, Tara Sands, and Julia Whelan offer clear and consistent character readings that steer listeners through the novel's varied voices, while also highlighting the characters' diversity of experience. Another nine actors provide added depth and color. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

June 8, 2015
Barrows (co-author of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society) turns her attention to a small town in West Virginia during the Great Depression. Macedonia is the kind of town where everyone knows everyone else's business. Into this insular environment comes a beautiful young outsider, Layla, who's been commissioned by the Federal Writers' Project to write a history of the town upon its sesquicentennial. She boards with the Romeyn family, formerly one of Macedonia's "first families," whose fortunes have fallen after a series of scandals, including a deadly fire at the hosiery factory the family once managed. Layla befriends reluctant spinster Jottie Romeyn, but Jottie's 12-year-old niece, Willa, deeply distrusts Layla's intentions toward Willa's dashing and often-absent divorced father, Felix. Told through a combination of letters and overlapping narratives primarily from Jottie, Willa, and Layla's points of view, the novel is also padded unnecessarily by numerous flashbacks and whole sections from Layla's work in progress. Some characters (such as Jottie's eccentric twin sisters) fail to live up to their initial promise; some plot points are developed and then dropped abruptly. Nevertheless, Barrows does capture the interior life of her primary characters in this portrait of a town on the border between the past and present, as well as North and South.