Synopses & Reviews
Set in the 1930s, this poignant, funny, and utterly original novel tells the story of one lost girl’s struggle for truth, identity, and understanding amidst her family’s nomadic, unconventional lifestyle.
What’s the right way to behave, to think, to feel—if you’re always the new girl? How do you navigate life when you’re continually on the move? Do you lie? How do you even know if you’re lying? What’s the truth anyway?
It’s 1928 and nine-year-old Lucresse Briard is trying to make sense of life and the jumbled, often challenging family it’s handed her: a single art-dealer father who thinks nothing of moving from place to place; her brother, Ben, who succeeds in any situation and seems destined for stardom; and their houseman, Fred, who acts like an old woman. As Lucresse advances through childhood to adolescence, she goes from telling wild lies for attention to desperately seeking the truth of who she is as a sophistication-craving teenager in the 1930s.
Told from Lucresse’s perspective as a grown woman, The Trouble with the Truth transcends its time in the late 1920s and ’30s, and weaves the story we all live of struggling to learn who we are and the truth behind this human journey.
About the Author
Edna Robinson (1921–1990) was an author and copywriter, who wrote the famous Oreo cookie lyrics “A kid’ll eat the middle of an Oreo first” and such lines as “Navigators of the world since it was flat.” Her short story, “The Trouble with the Truth,” was first published in the 1959 edition of the New World Writing series and selected as one of the “most exciting and original” stories of its time by the editors. The story has now been expanded into a novel of the same name, edited by her daughter Betsy. For more information, go to BetsyRobinson-writer.com.