Touched A Novel [Paperback]

Robbie Young is an ordinary twelve-year-old boy about to drop a bombshell that will devastate his small town family. One day he rides his bike home after school, finds his mother in the kitchen making dinner, and speaks aloud the secret he's been keeping for a year, Jerry Houseman's been touching me. Robbie has been molested and the Young family will never be the same. From that moment on, the novel unfolds with inexorable power. The story is narrated in four parts: first by Robbie's mother, then by Jerry Houseman himself, then by Houseman's wife Linda, and concluded by Robbie himself fifteen years later, when he has returned to town for a high school reunion. Each voice is remarkably persuasive and utterly convincing, and the result is a novel that is impossible to put down as it is impossible to forget.Scott Campbellwas raised in Jackson, Michigan. He is the author of two novels, both of which have been adapted by others for performance—one for the stage, one for the screen—and of a nonfiction collaboration with Phyllis R. Silverman.1
 
 
 
I am not an angry woman by nature. If anything, I’ve always gone too much in the other direction, being too friendly, too nice.
 
In high school, I was voted Sweetest Girl in my graduating class. Travis Dunlap and I had our picture taken for the yearbook at the Fanny Farmer on Michigan Avenue surrounded with heart-shaped boxes of candy, smiling sweetly at the camera. At least we were supposed to be smiling sweetly. But we got to goofing around and started feeding each other candies, then he smeared some chocolate on my face and I smeared some chocolate on his face and the photo that finally appeared in the yearbook showed us covered with chocolate, holding up fingers behind each other’s heads as if giving each other horns. I hadn’t looked at the photo since, until a couple of years ago, when I pulled out the yearbook to get ready for our fifteenth reunl3%