Penitence by Kristin Koval
Published by Celadon Books
Publication date: January 28, 2025
Genres: Book Clubs, Debut, Fiction, Contemporary, Literary
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When Penitence begins 13-year-old Nora is alone in a jail cell after turning herself in for killing her 14-year-old brother. An opening like this has the heft to carry a traditional thriller/mystery whether as a police procedural (solving the crime) or a courtroom drama (Nora on trial). Instead, debut author Kristin Koval forges a completely different path in what becomes a multi-layered novel about choices, mistakes, blame, and forgiveness.
The Sheehans live in Lodgepole, a small Colorado ski town. A place unequipped to deal with murder, especially by a teenage girl. A girl who, after calling 911 and confessing, won’t talk and who remains silent for the majority of the novel. Her father David hires the only criminal defense lawyer nearby, Martine Dumont, despite her being in her seventies and ready to retire. She’s also the mother of his wife Angie’s first love, Julian.
Angie is the novel’s most jarring character. A bereaved, distraught mother having lost her beloved son at the hands of her daughter. Her emotions and responses are unsettling and here I have to tread lightly, never having been a parent. As Koval puts it:
A mother is supposed to love her daughter, but Angie tingles with fury at Nora, a fury she’s not sure she could control in person. A fury that might dip into hate.
Angie’s anger is such that she refuses to see Nora, to visit her in jail at all. She acts as if Nora is as dead as their son, but only one is to be mourned. Rationally, I realize this is an untenable position for a parent, but it reads as horribly cruel and impacts empathy for her. She goes through the motions of involvement in prepping Nora’s defense, even when Martine is forced to bring in Julian, a noted children’s defense attorney, to help her. Only David spends time with their daughter, being held at juvenile facility three hours away.
Last week I reviewed a book that was unabashed in the way it portrayed good and bad, villains and heroes. I was all for the justice distributed by the novel’s tidy ending. It would seem then that Penitence told in shades of grey with blurred lines, and ambiguity would not get a high rating, but Koval is almost surgical in how she peels back the emotional and psychological layers of her characters, delving into guilt, blame, loss, identity, drive, and passion. They are on as much of a journey internally as they are in the external world if not more so.
A premise of “a small-town murder where the killer has confessed” seems straightforward enough, but even if the murder’s details are clearcut it’s only as Koval dissects each of the characters’ pasts that the truths they’ve lived with, the foundations for their present lives, are not as solid as they believed them to be. With thought-provoking insight she expands Penitence far beyond its sensationalistic opening taking it into unexpected realms and making it a novel I’m still thinking about weeks later.
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*I received a free copy of this book from Celadon Books in exchange for an honest review.*
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