Scan barcode
A review by tjlcody
That Fatal Night: The Titanic Diary of Dorothy Wilton by Sarah Ellis
4.0
This. This was good.
By chance, I read a book not too unlike the way this one is structured: The events are being told from a point in the future.
But this, this is a good example for how you do that and pull it off successfully.
Dorothy is telling us the story after it happens, but it's done with a great deal of realism: She hesitates. She cuts herself off. She starts and stops, like a trauma victim would. She describes things with the right amount of detail and description that a twelve year-old would give, and the way the information is written- it sounds like a kid writing it. It sounds like something that could have organically come from someone this age, about the actual tragedy.
And see, the descriptiveness and lack thereof works; in some parts, Dorothy's focusing on details because she doesn't want to get to the bad parts of the story. And then, when the bad parts happen, she relates them very shortly and simply, because she wants to get it done and over with.
Good book. Very good book.
By chance, I read a book not too unlike the way this one is structured: The events are being told from a point in the future.
But this, this is a good example for how you do that and pull it off successfully.
Dorothy is telling us the story after it happens, but it's done with a great deal of realism: She hesitates. She cuts herself off. She starts and stops, like a trauma victim would. She describes things with the right amount of detail and description that a twelve year-old would give, and the way the information is written- it sounds like a kid writing it. It sounds like something that could have organically come from someone this age, about the actual tragedy.
And see, the descriptiveness and lack thereof works; in some parts, Dorothy's focusing on details because she doesn't want to get to the bad parts of the story. And then, when the bad parts happen, she relates them very shortly and simply, because she wants to get it done and over with.
Good book. Very good book.