Tuesday, March 2, 2021

Teen Tuesday: Three Things I Know are True by Betty Culley

Three Things I Know are True by Betty Culley. 470 p. HarperTeen/ HarperCollins Publishers, January, 2020. 9780062908025. (Review of copy borrowed from public library.)

Teen Tuesday features a debut from 2020 that teens who crave sad are going to love. Three Things I Know are True by Betty Culley is a novel in verse narrated by fifteen-year-old Liv, whose seventeen-year-old brother, Jonah is in a vegetative state after a gun accident. Jonah was always brash and impulsive. When he found a gun in his best friend Clay's attic, he started waving it around wildly, asking Clay if he thought the gun was loaded. Despite Clay's pleas to put the gun down, Jonah put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

Now Jonah is home with round-the-clock nurses to care for him and the many machines that keep him alive. Liv's mother is suing Clay's parents and Liv has lost her two best friends. She and Clay meet secretly by the river that runs past their houses and play a favorite game of theirs called "Tell Me Three Things That are True" as they try and come to terms with their grief and worry over the upcoming trial that has split the town.

This spare verse novel pares a myriad of emotions down into a series of imagery that sucks the reader in from page one. I read this in one sitting. I needed to know what happened. I was so happy that Alex at Randomly Reading read and reviewed this book or I would've missed it.* I was also impressed by the medical stuff and how accurate it was, then learned in the author bio that Ms. Culley is a nurse. Kudos.

I can't wait to hear what my teen readers think of Three Things I Know are True and I'm looking forward to reading the author's sophomore effort. 


*I was going to write a short aside here, but it sort of morphed into a post and drew attention away from my review. Check it out here

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