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At 15, Lisa was a typical teenager, at times rebellious and impulsive, adjusting to newfound attention from boys and men. But when her demeanor takes a sudden turn, her teachers suspect something worse than adolescent moodiness. Lisa eventually confesses that she’s been abused, multiple times, and suspicion quickly falls on Marco, a worker who had done projects at her parents’ house. With his troubled history of drinking, unemployment, and casual sex, he’s sentenced without hesitation to 10 years in prison.
While others consider the matter settled and want to move on, guilt eats away at Lisa. No longer a minor, she drops her family’s hotshot Parisian lawyer ahead of the appeal hearing and makes a surprise visit to the office of a local attorney, Alice. Unassuming yet dogged in seeking justice, Alice agrees to represent her, and bring to light the painful truths obscured by Lisa’s past lies.
Drawing on years of experience covering trials, Pascale Robert-Diard combines keen insight and a vivid, powerful writing style in this story at the intersection of the #MeToo movement and class inequality.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
February 20, 2024 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781635424171
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781635424171
- File size: 1820 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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January 1, 2024
A defense attorney in France takes on a client who challenges her assumptions about what it means to be a victim. Alice Keridreux, who's in her early 50s, is a divorced mother of two adult children and an impassioned attorney who represents both the accused and their victims. When Lisa Charvet appears in Alice's office, it seems at first like a straightforward case. Five years prior, when Lisa was 15, she was sexually assaulted by Marco Lange, a laborer hired to work at her parents' home. With the support of her parents, schoolmates, and teachers--many of whom wrote witness statements attesting to the depths of Lisa's distress after the assault--Lisa won her case against Lange, a lifelong misfit who was given 10 years for his crime. Lange's appeals trial is in four months, and Lisa has come to Alice's office because she'd like to dismiss her hotshot Paris lawyer--Rodolphe Laurentin, who "specializes" in rape victims--in order to be "represented by a woman." Alice agrees, but the clear-cut case she expected quickly becomes something much more when Lisa reveals a secret that calls into question which of the two, plaintiff or defendant, is really the victim. In a story that addresses the many different kinds of truth available for the telling, even as it asks to what purposes those truths should be used, Robert-Diard writes a fast, tight, character-driven tale that refuses the easy answers so readily available in an era of social media activism in favor of the complexity of the all-too-human natures that motivate us all. Complex, provocative, and timely.COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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