Testimony
by Anita Shreve
In the wake of Tam Lin and my musings about a course on the campus novel, I reread this well-crafted and sensitive story of disaster at a New England prep school. The best chapters, in the end, are those told from the point of view of the most peripheral characters – a worker in the school cafeteria, the harried and irritated roommate of the freshman girl whose sex tape causes so much heartbreak, and the mother of one of the three boys on that tape. The coda might be too long, the plotting just a little too neat, but it’s a fine book.