What an interesting and different read! I heard a lot about this book and was very keen to read it and I can honestly say it didn't disappoint. I loved the different styles of writing and the different genres that are weaved together to form 1 story.

To quote the storyteller:

“I wrote my own story. I made it a thriller, a horror, a memoir, a noir."

This book is all of the above.

It is also a story that will get a lot of people talking and 1 that will rile up some people.

You are either going to love it or hate it and I can honestly say I loved it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Quercus Books for the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

I'd been interested in this book ever since I saw the cover of covers. With one of my jobs being in publishing, you come across a lot of books that could be packaged and marketed in different ways so it's not only satisfying but it piques the curiosity to see a book that goes: let's go for all of them. Tracing the fifteen-year fallout of a toxic high school rumour, Kate Reed Petty's debut novel is one that examines the power of stories—and who gets to tell them. It's a timely hybrid of styles, speaking to the issues of today - such a surprising and complex book, but remains almost stupidly easy and breezy to read. A lot of books are described as original; this is one of the few that felt it.

A real page-turner, this one! I wasn't 100% sold on it, and didn't love the ending, but it kept me gripped for most of the narrative, and I do find that it has stayed with me.

This book is completely original and thought provoking.
The format of this book could have gone so wrong but instead is one of the books real strengths!

set up as one of the most intriguing books of the year, it's definitely lived up to that.

jumping around perspectives and writing styles, it starts with the story of an alleged high school rape, jumping years into the future to then examine the aftermath of everyone involved. at points there are screenplays, emails, pdfs of essays, before it twists into horror scenes of woods and evil ex boyfriends.

the writing is visceral and bleak and sharp to the point it was hard to read and i grew to love and hate the main protagonists in equal measure. it jerked me along and it wasn't a comfortable reading experience but like i said, it was an interesting one. one that set out to surprise and intrigue the reader, which it definitely did

i gave it 3 stars but i think that's because personally some parts were too dark for me and at this moment in time i'm definitely not strong enough for that but i would recommend it to people who like thrillers, some horror, and just something different

it's not a reading experience that comes along much

True Story by Katy Reed Petty is one of those books you can't put down and definitely deserves a re-read as I'm sure there are lots of layers to be peeled back on the plot and themes. If you like experimental writing and the way we twist reality to match our truths then you're going to love this book. I was kindly sent an ebook version of this via Netgalley but I know that I will be definitely getting a physical copy of this book.
At the heart of this book, is a story about two college boys giving a girl a lift home after a party and the boys tell the story afterwards to their friends about what they did to this girl, sexually.
The format of the book starts off as standard college novel but then cuts out to Alice, the girl who was in the car as she struggles to grasp what happens as her life is destroyed by that event. She can't remember the details but this event leaks into all aspects of her life. Through out the book, the reader sees Alice's college application and the different versions as she tries to tackle the truth and what happened, as well as screen plays and emails. The book also morphs into a thriller as one of the boys, not present in the car on that night, tries to find out the truth. This is such a relevant book not only on college sexual assault but also on how reality can be manipulated by either other people or our internal processes to match the truth that we have in our heads.

I feel so mixed about this novel!

On the one hand, I can see that the author is an incredibly talented author who is versatile, intelligent and brave. I would be delighted to read more novels by Kate Reed Petty. On the other hand, this mixture of different forms, narrative styles and approaches felt a little like a student writing project to demonstrate their knowledge of writing and show off that they understood metafiction and postmodernism. Which might be the ideal reading experience for some people, but unfortunately felt a little forced and unnecessary to me.

The plot was great, the individual strands were each well-wrought and intelligent. I particularly enjoyed the creeping tension of Nick at the cabin, knowing something awful was just around the corner at any moment.

Overall, this was an interesting read and one I'll be thinking about for a long time.

CW: Sexual violence, gaslighting, pet death, emotional abuse, physical abuse, addiction, self-mutilation.

I honestly don't even know where to begin with reviewing this one. Genre-bending, with multiple POVs and formats, it sounds like it would be a difficult read. Against all expectations it was super-absorbing - with me finishing it in just a few hours, and Petty manages to bring the reader along with ease thanks to flawless pacing.

Although the pushing-off point for this novel is a sexual assault, the focus is on the fifteen-year fallout from the incident. When everybody is saying something different, and everyone had a part to play that night, who is telling the truth? And would knowing the truth even change anything? We follow Alice, primarily, in the aftermath of the incident. She makes a living as a ghostwriter, telling other people's stories - yet is still affected by the assault, a story she cannot know and so cannot tell.

I found this book to be triggering in just so many ways - but never enough to make me stop reading. The he said/she said dynamics of the social groups in particular will leave you with a sour taste in your mouth throughout and the inner monologues of some of the young men involved with the incident will hit far too close to home with the current dialogues surrounding victims of sexual violence.

I'm loathe to call this a thriller, or a horror, even though it definitely contains elements of both. In my opinion it's a thoughtful literary study into the social fallout and personal after-effects of sexual violence - for the victims, the perpetrators, and the surrounding circles. There's no hope here, but there is a shared experience and I definitely found a kind of hollow peace in that. I'll be thinking about this one for a long time.

Big thanks to the author, NetGalley, and Quercus Books for the eARC. Out now!

Unfortunately I had to DNF this one due to the subject matter. I'd heard a few questionable reviews about it and didn't want to push myself through it right now. I might try again in the future.

True Story is a book like no other. Its premise - a woman is unable to tell the story of how she was assaulted at a high school party, no matter how hard her friend tries to persuade her - isn't highly original, though how it is executed certainly is. Alice tells the story in four genres: memoir, horror, noir, thriller, each interspersed with scenes from cheesy scripts they wrote as children, scraps of emails, or drafts of college application letters. Each of the main stories show a different side of her life, but none can hold the full truth. Instead, the reader must decide what the "truth" is.

I really liked the premise of this book, and am so impressed with what Katie Reed Petty has done, but I think I got a bit lost along the way and wasn't as hooked as I had hoped. However, I read this book at the same time as some others and think it might be better read all in one go.

I think this is a brilliant book for anyone interested in how writers can blur the lines between fiction and non fiction, and what that can mean for sensitive topics like trauma and assault.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for this arc. I was intrigued by the premise of this novel and expected this to say something new on a topic covered extensively in the thriller genre. Unfortunately for me this book ultimately fell short; the execution didn’t quite work for me.

This starts with a prologue in Barcelona where we follow one of the protagonist called Alice who was the victim in a rape case decades ago.
Then we have a couple of horror scripts written by Alice and her friend Haley, which is followed by a narrative in the 90s where we see Nick who is on the lacrosse team. We see how the crime happened, through the team’s POV. Then we have some drafts of a personal statement for college from Alice, and then the narrative moves back to Nick in 2008 where he’s a drunk and going through a difficult relationship before moving to Alice and seeing her struggle in New York as she falls into a toxic and destructive relationship with Quinn. The story moves back and forth and it isn’t until the last 25% it comes full circle.

This had potential and I appreciated that the story comes together at the end but it takes such a long time and frankly I just wasn’t invested in these protagonists’ adult lives. Overall I felt this lacked suspense and the twists were rather lukewarm. It’s 3/5.

What goes around comes around. Nick and Alice, with a history that dates back to high school are now adults with advanced psychological issues and a shit-load of trauma. As they narrate their story in a fever-dream like a state, the unreliability of it all seems so obvious. This thriller is a layered one, with secrets and tragedies. It is based on themes of abuse and survival, broken friendships and memories that will haunt these characters forever. The writing, however, lags behind at places. So keep that in mind if you pick this up.

This book is soooo good - I couldn‘t put it down. As the blurb claims, it is a genre-defying mix of a campus novel, psychological thriller, horror story and crime noir.

This is true and I‘m still trying to process parts of it, what actually happened or didn‘t happen and how I feel about it.

Other than that, I‘m not going to tell you anything about it as it‘s one of those you should go into knowing nothing about.

But definitely read this book!

Nick is a lacrosse layer in a championship team, Alice goes to a private school and both end up at the same wild party. Two of Nick's teammates take Alice home and then boast about having sexually assaulted her, this is made public but they then deny it to the rest of the team. Both Alice and Nick then lead their own lives, travelling through addiction and relationship problems.
I think this book is trying just that little bit too hard! The first half was glacially slow and then the second half seemed to fly past. The chopping and changing between genres was just irritating - I hated the college applications section and the cabin in the woods section. The only slightly original bit seemed to be the twist at the end but that was just a little too late for me to care.

True Story is a book that I’ve been hearing about for quite a while now and I have been so looking forward to reading it. It definitely lived up to it’s hype in my opinion. It is not a book that is easy to describe because I actually think it’s better to go in blind with this one. Without saying too much I would describe it as the story of how one cataclysmic event or even rumoured event can drive and alter the course of a persons’ life for many years and how the concepts of truth and memory are intertwined and subjective. Most of all it is about who has the right to tell the ‘true’ story and how they should tell it.

It took me a little while to get into True Story but once it got me, I could not stop reading. It is compulsively addictive and totally unpredictable. It is told in a number of different formats, from multiple drafts of a university essay application to film scripts which keeps the reader on their toes and almost feels jarring in the best way possible . I love it when a book experiments with structure and does something a bit different and it worked perfectly in this case. The structure shows the many different ways that stories are told and interpreted. The two narrators, Nick and Alice, are unreliable enough that the reader is never quite sure of what is real and what is imagined. They are both damaged people and certain parts of the book are incredibly harrowing. The depictions of both abuse within relationships and alcoholism feels horrifyingly accurate and often deeply upsetting but I think it really manages to get across the pain and trauma that human beings can inflict on each other but also on themselves.

I found True Story hard to review because it kind of defies description but I hope I’m managing to get across how original and memorable it is. The best way I can describe it is that it is the kind of book which really gets under the skin of it’s readers. It is the sort of book that challenges and provokes a reaction. I highly recommend picking it up and experiencing it for yourself – it is absolutely worthy of all the hype it has received in my opinion.

True Story uses a mix of genres and character points of view to build a novel full of suspense. I was left wondering who was telling the truth and which of the elements were twisted and exaggerated. I wouldn't call it an enjoyable read due to the subject matter, but I definitely wanted to read on at the end of each chapter to find out what was going to happen.

Oh my goodness, what a book! I am the type of person who looks at the Goodreads reviews of a book before I start it and the first review I read said that True Story is "best enjoyed by going in blind". Once I saw that, I closed Goodreads and got stuck in. I have to say, I wholeheartedly agree.

The story is split into five parts.
Part one describes the backstory of a group of lacrosse players. One boy, Nick, has a bit of a thing for a girl called Haley who hangs around with them. After a party, two players (Max and Richard) drive Alice, a drunk girl, home and then brag to the group afterwards about performing a sexual act on her whilst she was passed out. Word gets around and she attempts suicide.

The rest of the book follows parts of Alice, Nick and Haley's lives in the fifteen years after that event. It is completely like nothing I have ever read before. There is a complete mix of genres and formats in there. It's written so unusually with a mix of prose, scenes set like a TV show or play, a series of emails and transcripts. It is just fantastic and it makes for a very quick and easy read.

I really don't want to give too much away but the story is so deep and I honestly cannot recommend it enough. I was totally hooked throughout and the epilogue is just wonderful. I don't know how else to describe it. Amazing.

3 STARS

After a college party, two boys drive a girl home: drunk and passed out in the back seat. Rumours spread about what they did to her, but later they'll tell the police a different version of events. Alice will never remember what truly happened. Her fracture runs deep, hidden beneath cleverness and wry humour. Nick - a sensitive, misguided boy who stood by - will never forget.

That's just the beginning of this extraordinary journey into memory, fear and self-portrayal. Through university applications, a terrifying abusive relationship, a fateful reckoning with addiction and a final mind-bending twist, Alice and Nick will take on different roles to each other - some real, some invented - until finally, brought face to face once again, the secret of that night is revealed.

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Unpopular opinion alert - I didn't love this.

Oh, I wanted to. It was one of my highly anticipated summer reads! But...it just didn't work for me. I felt like TRUE STORY was trying too hard to be different things and never quite did any of them justice. TRUE STORY is told through a variety of mediums - story, email, college essay applications etc - which typically I really enjoy. This time, however, I felt that it made the story was too jumbled and I really struggled to figure out how it was all supposed to be part of the same book. Thankfully, the ending did supply the "ah ha" moment (hence why this is 3 stars and not 2) and I "get" the reasoning for it - I just didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped.

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and publisher for my ARC! TRUE STORY is out now.

There are few things I love more than a truly unique thriller and that’s what I was expecting from True Story. I was super excited to get into it and although I enjoyed it for the most part, it wasn’t quite the page-turner I was hoping for.

Told through layered points of view, the story of a rumoured sexual assault on a young girl by members of a high school lacrosse team circulates the community, when the girl attempts suicide. Fifteen years later, ghostwriter Alice, alcoholic Nick, filmmaker Haley and affluent business owner Richard are still dealing with the truth of what really happened that night and the effects it has had on their adult lives.

Male privilege is a big theme in the book, so be prepared for reams of misogyny from Nick and his teammates. Haley is a girl that Nick likes a lot and yet he still finds it really easy to criticise and belittle her and her opinions. Despite the book opening in 1999, slut shaming and objectification of women are still rife today, so it’s not too much of a stretch to believe that these attitudes still exist within the minds of teenage boys.

‘And anyway if she tried to commit suicide, didn’t it only prove that she was unstable, the kind of person who drank too much and regretted it after?’

One thing I was really impressed by was Reed Petty’s ability, as a woman, to capture the essence of young guys sticking fast to their loyalties and ‘logical’ reasons for doing and defending terrible actions. We all know that these guys exist and everything about their thoughts and conversations rang true. It’s extremely unsettling reading but thoroughly believable.

As the rumoured victim of the assault, Alice’s life has unsurprisingly been shaped by what happened. She can’t really remember what happened to her that night but she is devastated by the mere possibility that she could have been violated. Her early sexual experiences have led her to fall into an abusive relationship with a man she calls Q. Like most battered women, she appears to idolise him and watching her decline into illness and dependence was horrific.

As Alice begins to emerge from her trance, we get some vital lessons and red flag indicators for women in the text. I really enjoyed this aspect of the novel too and I could tell that Reed Petty’s intention was to amplify Alice’s voice and story as a sexual assault victim. However, I didn’t really think that her character was terribly well developed and therefore, I lacked a true empathetic connection with her. There was also this shadow over the whole situation as to whether she actually was assaulted or not, which again made it hard to fully rely on her version of events.

The book changes perspective quite regularly and I didn’t grasp much of Nick’s strand at all. He fell into alcoholism after high school and takes a trip to a log cabin that belongs to an apparent ex girlfriend called Lindsey, whose trust he is desperate to win back. After a drink-fuelled, violent episode in the cabin, his fragile psyche is splayed wide open and although he wasn’t ever the accused perpetrator of the assault, he seems to carry an enormous amount of guilt over it. It was difficult to follow and with the constant perspective changes, it simply left me utterly confused as to the natural connections between the characters’ adult stories.

True Story is a book that merges several genres including mystery, suspense, literary fiction and in some places, it even reads like a YA drama. It’s an interesting read with some important lessons but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. The characters lacked depth, the story was pretty confused and there wasn’t quite enough tension to hold my interest.

‘It is amazing what can begin to seem normal just because it happens all the time.’

Kate Reed Petty’s debut had quite the buzz when review copies first started circulating. It’s timely mystery about the events of a fateful night during high school, and how it has changed the lives of those involved and caught on the edge. Told through a variety of styles, it’s an interesting examination of how we frame our own stories, who has the right to tell certain stories, and how they shape our lives.

True Story asks readers to consider a number of questions about our stories: Whose story gets to be told? Who gets to say what is the truth? Who gets to tell our story? What if the story we’ve told ourselves, or others have told us, is not true? How do we make amends? Petty addresses each of these in interesting and original ways (at least, I’ve never read a novel that takes all of these stylistic and narrative approaches and mashes them together). There’s a good deal of unreliability in each narrator — especially once you arrive at the ending and there’s a bit of a Russian doll thing going on, which didn’t land for me in quite the way I think the author intended.

I don’t think the novel is meant to provide easy answers, and we’re left to question our assumptions and feelings about each of the characters in turn: we get to see their agendas through their own and others’ eyes, their contradictions, weaknesses, blindspots, and so forth. It’s quite well done. When I was about 3/4 in, I wasn’t sure what Petty was trying to do with the novel, or where she was going to take it next. I wasn’t sure who the author thought was at fault, either. There are times when the novel could be read as a critique of modern day feminism and activism surrounding #MeToo, or the willingness of some to accept the worst and define themselves in unhealthy ways. There’s a lot of murk in the novel, in other words, and some of the decisions made in relation to the plot were… unusual. This murkiness made it difficult to connect with all of the characters, and despite the material and subjects covered, it felt a little more shallow than I expected. [I’m avoiding spoilers, so sorry about the vagueness.]

The novel certainly has its ups-and-downs. There are plenty of interesting observations and bits of characterizations. (Petty perfectly, critically, and amusingly captures the oft-shallow concerns of the teenage male/jock, for example.) How successful the various devices and gimmicks are will depend on how well you get on with them. There are quite a few different approaches deployed over the course of the novel — they’re all interesting, and ones that I’ve enjoyed in other novels by other authors. However, some of them outlast their welcome, and come to feel more gimmicky than clever or “enthralling in its brilliance”. (True Story has overly effusive back cover copy, which in my opinion is a very risky move and often fails to deliver.)

There’s no question that Petty is an good writer. The author’s prose is excellent, and the various different styles and voices used to tell the story are distinctive and well executed. As mentioned, however, some of them overstayed their welcome, and there were a few moments when my attention flagged and interested dipped. For example, the college admission essay — while an intriguing device to show the evolution of Alice’s comfort with her own experiences, how she copes and how she sees herself, it went on for longer than was necessary and/or interesting. Similarly, Nick’s weekend bender was a perfect example of a drunken protagonist losing it — unfortunately, a narrative style/trope that doesn’t work for me. (Novels like Bright Lights, Big City and Less Than Zero have unfortunately never really worked for me.) There wasn’t enough depth, in my opinion, to make me fully invested in any of these characters’ fates — yes, there is sympathy, but after certain revelations one feels conflicted about who is the real villain. And the ending just sees the novel fizzle out. I understand that this is the point — especially that tidy endings are never guaranteed in real life, and catharsis is not always forthcoming — but it casts so much doubt over everything, that I think it undermines its (possible) message. Nevertheless, I kept reading despite these flaws and issues. To me, it’s a testament to Petty’s writing — I’ve become far more comfortable with jettisoning novels that don’t work for me, but I didn’t toss this one.

Definitely an author to watch, and I am certainly interested to see what Petty writes next. This debut, while flawed in strange ways, is certainly worth checking out if you’re looking for something different.