Review by Booklist Review
The Quinn family is New York elite: family wealth, boarding school educations, every facet of privilege imaginable. Cassie has been a member of the family since she lost her parents as a child. (Her father had been mentor and close friend to Lawrence Quinn.) Post college, Cassie attempts to forge her own path in graduate school at Yale, but is pulled back to New York when her younger brother is accused of rape by his girlfriend at Princeton. The ensuing investigation and trial force Cassie to reckon with her place in the Quinn family, and an obsessive relationship that defined her young life. Unreliable narrator Cassie's own arc of self-discovery runs parallel to her brother's trial and the secrets it uncovers. As she explains in an author's note, Medoff (I Couldn't Love You More, 2012) began drafting this novel prior to the rise of the #MeToo movement. Through Cassie, the author explores the complexities of teenage girls' sexuality and agency. At times, the ripped-from-the-headlines feel of the plot threatens to overtake the character-driven narrative, but Medoff's clear sense of Cassie's voice carries the novel throughout.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Medoff's emotional latest (after This Could Hurt), a young woman and her adoptive family contend with her younger brother's trial for sexual assault. Cassie Forrester-Quinn, 23, returns home to Manhattan from her graduate studies at Yale after Billy, a junior at Princeton, is arrested following accusations from his girlfriend, Diana. Cassie's older brother Nate bemoans how Billy will be skewered in the media as the "whole trifecta: rich, white, Ivy League athlete," despite his complicated, rocky history with Diana, whom Cassie sees as "manipulative and vindictive." As trial preparations begin, their mother, Eleanor, refuses to allow Billy to accept a plea deal, while their father, Lawrence, favors the plan in order to protect family secrets. Meanwhile, when a detective interviews Cassie, she mentions a sexual relationship she had with an older married man named Marcus when she was a teen. She's always believed the relationship was consensual, but now she begins processing how it's affected her life. Still, Cassie continues to support Billy, believing "women's feelings eclipse men's civil rights." Some of the twists end up feeling contrived after the revelations emerge, such as the full picture of Cassie and Marcus's connection, but Medoff does a good job developing Cassie's complicated feelings, and leaves readers reflecting on the family's intergenerational abuse of power. By the end, this is both satisfying and heartbreaking. (Aug.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Casey is convinced that younger brother Billy, a Princeton junior, would never have raped his former girlfriend, Diana, and joins her Upper East Side parents in their efforts to get him exonerated. But that could mean revealing some painful secrets of her own. Author of the best-selling This Could Hurt, Medoff pushes some hot buttons here; with a 75,000-copy first printing.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A rape accusation and its aftermath threaten to tear apart a superrich New York family. The Quinn family is among the one percent. Lawrence, the patriarch, runs a charitable nonprofit; his wife, Eleanor, is an old-money socialite. Together, they have two sons--Nate, the eldest, and Billy, a Princeton athlete and pre-med student. They also have a daughter, Cassie, whom Lawrence and Eleanor unofficially adopted when her own parents, close friends of the Quinns', died a short time apart. Cassie narrates the novel, part courtroom drama, part domestic thriller, beginning with a phone call from Nate informing her that their brother has been accused of rape. The circumstances of the assault (borrowed closely from the 2016 Brock Turner case) can't shake the Quinns' faith in Billy and in each other, and their only focus becomes Billy's acquittal and revealing the truth to the world: The girl accusing Billy is vindictive and ruthless. There are men in the age of #MeToo, they insist, who are falsely accused and run the risk of ruined lives. But as Cassie unspools the story of the investigation, the preparations for trial, and then, finally, the courtroom theatrics, her narration pulls back layer after layer of secrets and manipulations like a magician pulling scarves from a sleeve. Medoff's greatest feat in this novel is not the twisty plotting but rather Cassie's evolving relationship with the reader, with storytelling itself, as she moves from suspiciously naïve to clearly unreliable, and always with a questionable moral compass. Readers who can orient themselves to Cassie's "double vision" ("one world layered on top of the other, neither of them reality") will be rewarded with a thoughtful, if salacious, thriller about the nature of wealth, loyalty, and the ripple effects of trauma. A layered and compelling peek into the darkest consequences of privilege. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
