Testimony

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Average customer rating 4 (4 comments)

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Testimony by Anita Shreve tells the story of a group of private school boys who changes their lives irrevocably in one moment of wild abandon. That one moment sweeps up the entire school, their parents, and the surrounding community in its aftermath. The book begins with the fateful moment and then takes you both back to explain the events leading up to the moment and forward to lay out the consequences. As we have come to expect Shreve presents us with clear, clean writing and an interesting plot. There are plenty of moral dilemnas here to ponder and Shreve leaves most of it open to your own interpretation. Did the boys deserve the final outcome? Where did their parents go wrong? Was the event inevitable? I listened to the audio version of this book. It was recorded with a full cast of characters which definitely gives the feeling of being there, on campus, in the middle of the big scandel. I loved the different viewpoints presented by the boys, the girl, a girlfriend of one of the boys, parents, headmaster, and even a lunch lady at the school. It gives you a complete picture while letting you see that no one character in the book had such a complete picture of what ocurred. Testimony held my interest and gave me some things to think about, but in the end it is a pretty dark and disturbing cautionary tale.

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I have read all of Anita Shreve's books and have liked every one of them. However, I believe "Testimony" is her best novel yet as this great author provides the reader with thought provoking scenarios to make them do some thinking as each person gives their "testimony". The subject matter of this novel is very serious and Ms. Shreve handles it in a way that makes it an educational experience for the reader to see how something like this could affect so many lives. As a mother of one son & seven grandsons, (two in college) "Testimony" kept me awake one full night turning pages, thinking: wow! this could be "one of my boys!" The characters, whether they were students, faculty or parents were compelling. Be sure to add this novel to your reading list which also would be an appropriate selection for book review clubs - at least 4 stars ****

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Tragic consequences This novel is a poignant and rather disheartening story set in Avery, Vermont, mostly connected with matters related to the Avery Academy, a private school for high-school-age kids. It is a story of unintended consequences, but is it really possible to contain the fallout from a discovered affair of a headmaster and the mother of a basketball player or, even more significant to this story, from the posting on the Internet of a tape of a drunken orgy in a dorm room involving a prematurely experienced fourteen-year-old girl and three older boys from the basketball team. The story opens with Mike Bordwin the headmaster watching the tape and knowing that many lives and the world of Avery Academy are about to be profoundly disrupted, if not destroyed. The author allows the story to unfold gradually through a series of chapters told from the perspective of the principals of the events as well as peripheral characters. Besides headmaster Mike, basketball player Silas Quinney, his girlfriend Noelle, and Silas’ mother are most important to the story. While the episode caught on tape was in clear violation of the law, the author’s concerns are with how personalities, circumstances, and the various environments developed and interacted to lead to this scenario. The reader is drawn into the story as there are several places where there is a desire to reach out to the characters and advise them to take a different route, to make a different decision. Wouldn’t we all like to do that with our lives – change a decision from years ago? But they, like us, have to live with what they have chosen, regardless of unpleasant results. As might be expected the story gradually changes as more is revealed, as a perspective is contradicted by one more credible. The main characters are fairly well understandable by virtue of their thought processes and actions. The book is fairly easy to read, although the shifting around between characters and time frames is a little difficult to follow, but one can generally figure it out.

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This is beautifully written in the many voices who participated and observed the events that take place. The book is heartbreaking and very full of human desires... This is a very timely and thought provoking book. I couldn't put it down.