True Story

June 1, 2020
In Perry’s captivating debut, 30-something ghostwriter Alice Lovett is haunted by what happened at a lacrosse party 16 years earlier in a Baltimore suburb. In 1999, Nick Brothers and his high school lacrosse team are known for their legendary post-championship parties, usually followed by a midnight recap at their favorite Denny’s. After one party his senior year, Nick shows up at Denny’s with his crush Haley Moreland just in time to catch two of his teammates bragging about what they did with a passed out private school girl—whom the reader eventually learns is Alice—in the back of one of their cars. The facts of what happened that night morph as the story spreads through their suburban community, and the consequences will shape Alice, Haley, Nick, and his teammates over the following decades. Perry eschews conventional structure, replacing parts of the narrative with drafts of Alice’s college admissions essays, her emails to Haley after an abusive relationship as an adult, and Alice and Haley’s teenage screenplays to incendiary effect, and they mix seamlessly with the nimble prose. Though the plot sometimes wanders, Perry’s page-turner is as sly and devastating as the nature of truth. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.

Starred review from June 1, 2020
Petty's innovative, genre-busting debut opens with a vignette set in Barcelona, in which an unnamed narrator addresses another unnamed character, telling her she's sorry for standing her up. From there, the novel rockets through metafictional sections?a script for a horror movie, a first-person narrative, a set of revisions for a college essay, and more?which initially seem disparate but are inevitably connected. In the first substantive segment, a young lacrosse player named Nick Brothers explains what happened to him and his team in 1999. Two boys on Nick's team drove a private school student named Alice Lovett home, and rumors of assault swirled, but no one ever proved what really happened. The event's repercussions ripple out through time, as Petty explores it from various perspectives until revealing a set of shocking truths. Alice gets to tell her side, too, but in a wholly unexpected way. Themes of friendship, abuse, reality, and trauma resonate in this puzzle box of a book, and readers will be unable to put it down until they figure it out.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)