The propulsive memoir Notes on a Silencing opens in October 1990, when Lacy Crawford, at age 15, was sexually assaulted by two star athletes at St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H.--described in the third person.
The facts carry readers along as they would in a crime novel, with clinical details that force observers to imagine the motives and emotions of the perpetrators and victim. Crawford then shifts to a first-person narrative. "What interests me," she writes, "is the near impossibility of telling what happened in a way that discharges its power." She explores power in its countless iterations: the power of peers, parents, teachers, administrators, alumni--and the power of a diploma from a storied school.
By toggling between the timelines before and after the book's central event, she conveys the universal experience of survivors--the divide between the person she was and the person she becomes afterward--and builds the narrative to the epiphany that unlocks her silence. --Jennifer M. Brown, senior editor, Shelf Awareness