A young boy and his father are out on what appears to be a pleasant, bond-forming rock climb, when out of nowhere the boy’s rope is abruptly severed. As the boy appears to plunge to his premature death, we meet the unnamed, chuckling villain who cut the rope. His motivations for this act will not become clear until roughly halfway through the book, at which point the narrative has become invested with the story of Alethea, an Olympic gymnast-trainee who suffers a catastrophic car accident on her sixteenth birthday. As she begins to recover from her near-lethal encounter with a guardrail, windshield, and a frozen lake, she starts to marvel both at her changed body and her peculiar therapist. The accident hasn’t crippled her, exactly: It has somehow bizarrely strengthened her. Why is her therapist so keen to help her remember the accident that she has blacked out of her memory? And why does she feel so strong?
The answers to these questions open up a second, far wilder narrative that transforms the book from conventional YA into supernatural fantasy/torture-porn mode. Suffice to say that Jesse Arnold not only knows how to tell a riveting story, but also how to blend genres without losing the thread of the narrative. Alethea, her parents, and her friends are so believably written that their evolution and transformation in the second half of the book are simultaneously shocking and seemingly natural.
ALETHEA’s combination of genuine emotional investment, intricate storytelling and off-the-charts imagination makes it one of the most unusual (if occasionally off-putting) reads of the year.
Reviewed by Julia Lai for IndieReader