Although the writing is uneven, this book has an interesting premise of telling the story of a child rapist from his perspective as well as that of his victims. The plot is sometimes confusing as it veers between distant past, recent past, and present, and the story ends abruptly at an interesting point, almost as if the author ran out of ideas. Recommended with reservations. ( )

Memorable but not in a good way, this novel is like a pedophile enigma wrapped in a pedophile mystery, with ancestral molestation lurking in the wayback. In two generations, neglectfully criminal parents allow free-ranging young girls to be victimized. There's a first person narrative by Nora, adolescent attendee of an elite Brooklyn school where the most popular male teacher seems to have free reign over his young female students, with the complicity of his wife, who ran off with him at fifteen to escape her own abuse at home. A secondary plot focuses on yet another pedophile teacher, who is being prosecuted by Nora and defended by Nora's childhood schoolmate, part of the cabal that was preyed upon by the first teacher. Yikes. There's also emails from said first teacher, who defends his actions by saying that "Twenty six is the same as seventeen for boys". According to the author blurb, she attended a Brooklyn private school shut down in 2014 that was all over the news , so this is obviously a roman-a-clef and a most unsavory one. The structure presents some outcomes as plot twists, but it's all so repulsive that by the end, the reader is exhaustedly beyond disturbed. Highly not recommended, especially for the many readers could be triggered. ( )

Rachel Cline's novel, The Question Authority, may be slim- only 222 pages- but it packs a lot into those 200+ pages.

We begin in 2009 where we find Nora looking for her lost cat, where they are the only occupants in her deceased grandfather's huge Brooklyn Heights home. She is heading for work at the New York City Department of Education, where she is part paralegal, part insurance adjuster, preparing paperwork for settlement offers for lawsuits against the department.

When her boss asks her to work up a settlement offer for a teacher accused of having inappropriate relationships with his female students, it doesn't sit right with Nora. When she was in 8th grade, her best friend Beth (and several other girls) were the victims of a 26 year-old charismatic pedophile teacher, Bob Rassmussen.

Nora discovers that the opposing counsel representing the teacher is none other than her former best friend Beth, whom she hasn't spoken to since high school. How could Beth represent this man after what happened to her?

Nora asks to take the case to court after finding that this teacher has been accused ten years earlier of the same thing and gotten a slap on the wrist. This puts her in conflict with Beth who assumes that the Education Department will settle and pay the teacher off, as they have repeatedly done.

Beth and Nora meet, and Nora wants to talk about what happened in the 1970s to Beth and the other girls. Beth has moved on, and doesn't want to rehash it. But Nora is dogged about it, and digs deep into Beth's life to find out what she wants to know.

Although Nora is the main narrator, we get chapters from other characters point of view- including emails from Bob Rassmussen where he details his attempts to reconnect with his own children. We find the trail of destruction he left is wide-ranging.

In the 1970s, Bob took his wife, young children, and several girls (including Beth) from Nora's school to Arizona, where he sexually abused the girls. Nora was supposed to go, but at the last minute she changed her mind.

There are a few heartbreaking revelations that come late in the story that I did not see coming, but really give the story a deeper resonance.

It took me awhile to get into The Question Authority, and reading it on an ereader sometimes made it difficult to keep track of who was narrating the chapter. (I recommend you read this in a hard copy.) But once I was able to keep things straight, I found myself enveloped in Nora's story, which I think many women who came of age in the 1970's can relate to.

The Question Authority is a book that you will want to sit with awhile after you finish. If you read a book by another woman named Cline- Emma Cline's The Girls- you should put The Question Authority on your list. They both deal so honestly with teenage girls' fee ( )