Penelope J Bristol

Review of eBook

An accident leaves a woman hanging upside down in her car. Is she dying? She doesn’t know, but she suddenly understands that everything appears quite differently when one can see the truth.

Eight years before the accident, twelve-year-old Lucy Elizabeth Morgan believes she is very different from the rest of her family. Having discovered, much to her dismay, that the truth was not always the easy solution to a problem, she decides that the problem is the fact that she is a bizarre kid.

But her dysfunctional family is the very big problem in Lucy’s life.

Lucy does not know what to do . . . her father, John, struggles to stay employed; her mother, Dianne, obviously favors her older sister, Anne. The teen does whatever she wants, whenever she wants and has no desire to be a sister-confidant to her years-younger sister. And Lucy struggles to understand.

With an angry, abusive father and a mother who looks away and finds respite in a bottle of wine, Lucy does all she can to keep things quiet around the house even though there’s little she can actually control.

What does Lucy see that changes everything?

The highlight of the novella is the stark depiction of a dysfunctional, abusive family and the way in which it affects the children living in the home.

Young adults are the targeted audience for this story, the first of three. Presumably, “The Truth Lucy Spoke” and “The Truth Lucy Found” will provide the answers that are missing here; at the end of this installment, readers will find out nothing about the accident or about what happens to Lucy and her family. There is no closure; all of the plot points remain dangling. Since all three novellas are extremely short, readers are apt to wonder why the author opted not to put them together in one book.

Despite its promising start, it is difficult to recommend this novella. With all plot points remaining unresolved and with its decidedly abrupt ending, the story leaves too many unanswered questions, causing readers to feel frustrated and disappointed.… (meer)