Review : Allegedly by Tiffany D. Jackson
Allegedly by Tiffany D. Jackson
Pages : 387
Genre : YA, Mystery
Stand alone
My Rating : 4.5/5
About the Book :
Allegedly. She didn’t say much in that first interview with detectives, and the media filled in the only blanks that mattered: A white baby had died while under the care of a churchgoing black woman and her nine-year-old daughter. The public convicted Mary and the jury made it official. But did she do it? She wouldn’t say.
Mary survived six years in baby jail before being dumped in a group home. The house isn’t really “home”—no place where you fear for your life can be considered a home. Home is Ted, who she meets on assignment at a nursing home.
There wasn’t a point to setting the record straight before, but now she’s got Ted—and their unborn child—to think about. When the state threatens to take her baby, Mary must find the voice to fight her past. And her fate lies in the hands of the one person she distrusts the most: her Momma. No one knows the real Momma. But who really knows the real Mary?
My Thoughts
My first impressions shared on Goodreads were that this book was shocking, infuriating and engrossing all at once. Other words readers have used to describe their reading experience are : dark, emotional, gritty, disturbing, twisted, powerful, and so on… All of them perfectly suiting this unique novel. With great compassion, Tiffany D. Jackson offers a sharp and unwavering story that won’t soon be forgotten.
Allegedly made me angry, in a very visceral way. I felt angry for (and sometimes, at) Mary, at the people around her who were supposed to take care of her, at the world in general. The social commentary here was also on point. Allegedly talks of crime, race, teen pregnancy and “the system” in a very frank way, no gloss.
Mary was such a fascinating character, and I felt she was really well written. I loved that she was both clever and mature at times, and incredibly young and naive at others. She was complex in a very sensical way, everything about her actions or her personality being well explained by a combination of the life she’d had and her age. She was also extremely secretive, meaning its up to the reader to try to piece things together, or wait until she’s ready to share her secrets.
My only big criticism of the book was its ending – and I’m talking here of the very last few pages of the book. I really, really, really didn’t like some of the decisions that were made, both by the characters and the author. In a way, I felt that some of them contradicted what the rest of the book was saying… and it was such a let down for me.
But even with this disappointment, I absolutely loved Allegedly. It gave me so much to think about, it broke my heart, it enraged me. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long, long time. Readers of crime fiction might be interested in this one, even those who usually don’t read YA. I’d say – with a lot of love for the YA category – that Mary might be a teenage character, but Allegedly is much more than your regular teen mystery!
Any book that makes you feel like that is worth reading. I’ll have to look for this one.