Kate Reed Petty’s debut True Story is the story of a high school junior’s sexual assault in the back of a car. Drunk at a party, Alice Lovett is driven home by two lacrosse players, Max and Richard, and the details of the assault spread throughout their town, destroying several lives in the process.

When the novel opens Alice is living in Barcelona and working as a ghost writer. Someone has asked her to tell the story of what happened all those years ago, but Alice is reluctant to even talk to this person.

The truth is I was embarrassed. You’ve always been the one who was brave – no, the one who was sure. You’ve always been so sure of the story you want me to tell. the story you’ve been asking me for since we were seventeen: the story about the things that happened while I was asleep.

Now, Alice hopes this person will accept the version of the story she is prepared to give.

Petty employs a variety of different formats to tell this story. There are movie scripts, college application drafts (complete with teacher feedback); there’s an account from Nick Brothers, a member of the same lacrosse team who was there when Max and Richard came back to the Denny’s and bragged about what they had done to Alice in the backseat of the car; there’s a whole series of email messages from Alice to Haley (the friend who has been encouraging Alice to tell her story); there’s the transcript of an interview Alice is trying to spin into a book for a client. There is nothing necessarily linear about the narrative and it doesn’t matter one bit.

I couldn’t put this book down.

But besides being a page turner, True Story definitely has something to say about rape culture and the way women’s stories are told. I found Alice’s college application essays a perfect example of this. She is trying to write about something that has had an impact on her life (the assault) and she attempts to get there through several drafts, before eventually landing on a benign story about shoes. Society has made it almost impossible for women to tell their own stories and you barely even know that it is happening.

True Story is a horror story, a mystery, a revenge story: it’s well-written and fast-paced and thoughtful and I highly recommend it.