Damages

What I remember best about that week in January is trying to keep track of all the lies I told... 1998. Ontario has been hit by a days-long, life-endangering ice storm, and on Regis University campus, with classes cancelled, the students are partying. In the midst of it all, eighteen-year-old Ros's roommate Megan goes missing. As a panicked search ensues, Ros is blamed for not keeping a closer eye on Megan, and the incident casts a shadow over the next two decades of her life. 2020. Ros's former partner, Lukas, the father of her eleven-year-old son, is accused of a sexual assault. The accusation brings new details of an old story to light, forcing Ros to revisit a dark moment from her past. Ros must take a hard look not only at the father of her child, but also at her own mistakes, her own trauma, and at the supposedly liberal period she grew up in.

Genevieve Scott is a sophisticated writer, and The Damages is a sharp, multi-layered story about truth, lies, history and memory. I stayed up late to finish it! I was not disappointed: this is a complex and satisfying novel, The Damages is the most honest novel I've read in a long time. A propulsive story about the complexities of trust, the cruelties in relationships, and the space between meaning well and doing good. Genevieve Scott is a fresh, brilliant voice in fiction, The Damages led me into a maze with a thread-and then just never let me go. This story builds with thrilling intensity through moral knots and human dilemmas, led by a brilliantly complex protagonist as she navigates her way through betrayal, guilt and culpability, There is a skillful irony in a character so courageously honest about her lies. Genevieve Scott offers a view inside of a complicated woman from young adulthood to middle age, in refreshing and deceptively clean prose. The Damages takes a critical look at truth and perspective in a (post-) #MeToo era, calling into question the ways our personal truths are shaped by our pasts, he Damages is an eerily sharp depiction of being self-conscious, self-obsessed, and eighteen in the late nineties, and just how painful it can be to face the past and question why one makes the choices they do when they're young. Packed with insecurity, embarrassment, jealousy, and shame, each page made me anxious in the best possible way. Heart pounding, I couldn't stop reading!

GENEVIEVE SCOTT is a Canadian writer. Her first novel, Catch My Drift, was published in 2018 with Goose Lane Editions and her short fiction has been published in literary journals in Canada and the UK. Genevieve holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She teaches writing at the Laguna College of Art and Design in Laguna Beach and mentors at-risk teen writers through the LA-based nonprofit, WriteGirl. Genevieve grew up in Toronto and currently lives in Irvine, California, with her partner and son.