I am reading the Testimony

The Testimony is an interesting story and very topical since it covers young people having drunken group sex, taping it, and posting it on the internet and the resulting media frenzy over the scandal.


This book was unusual and sometimes confusing in that it was written from the first, second, and third person perspective plus an epistolary narrative voice in the very last chapter. As you can imagine, we heard the "voices" of several characters. Silas was a character that was speaking to "you" and the you was his girlfriend. The character Ellen was addressed in the second person; "you". Sometimes the you refers to Jacqueline Barnard, a researcher who is contacting the main characters two years after the scandal.

We see the action that takes place days leading up to the sex scandal, the day of the scandal, and the days after the scandal and then two years after the scandal.

The message essentially is that one's negative actions can trigger catastrophic consequences for so many others.

Silas is the character that I thought was a little unrealistic. His fury was realistic but I also think that a teenager in his siutation would have confided in his girlfriend and perhaps his fate would have been different. I noticed that the writer did not make the teenaged girl, at the center of the teen sex orgy, sympathetic. She was just a spoilt, out of control, lying brat.

Overall this was a good story.