Until Alison
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The night Alison was murdered, Rachel could have stopped it.
When Rachel Nardelli learns that Alison Petrucci—her childhood rival—is found dead in Pleasant Pond, the same place the two girls had first said “goodbye” to each other back in eighth grade, the town of Waterbury is outraged by the fear of losing one of their own—the heir to Maine’s largest construction company. But Alison’s death is a little more complicated for Rachel. She’d seen Alison the night she died. She’d said something she shouldn’t have, had callously stirred up the past. And the next morning, Alison was gone.
Plagued by the long-barbed memories surrounding Alison, Rachel joins her journalism crew to investigate the murder. But as she’s forced to revisit their fraught relationship, she falls into a web of cruelties that threatens to undo everything she understood about her past.
An explosive literary thriller from the acclaimed Kate Russo, Until Alison is a brilliantly incisive and resonant novel that is at once about class, gender, and the arbitrary nature of violence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Russo's melancholy sophomore effort (after Super Host) is an earnest meditation on teen angst and adult regret centered on the entwined lives of two childhood friends. From the ages of six to 12, Rachel Nardelli and Alison Petrucci were best friends. That changed when they entered junior high in staunchly middle-class Waterbury, Maine, where being rich was a "cardinal sin," and the Petruccis were "far wealthier than anyone else." Rachel split from Alison, launching a rivalry that continues into their days at Denman College and lingers until the moment Alison is found dead on the banks of Waterbury's Pleasant Pond, following a boozy party hosted by Rachel's boyfriend. The pond happens to be the site of the rupture between the young women, and when Rachel finds out it's where Alison died, it sends her mind whirling back to her own cruelty, cowardice, and manipulation over the past decade. A journalist for the university newspaper, Rachel reports on Alison's murder, wading through her own guilt in the process. Less a straightforward mystery than a tender character study, Russo's elegiac novel offers moving considerations of forgiveness and the often thorny nature of female friendship. Unfortunately, the pacing is a little too shaky to allow those insights to resonate as deeply as they might. It's a mixed bag.
