Until Alison - by Kate Russo (Hardcover)

About the Book

"I Have Some Questions for You meets Prep in Kate Russo's explosive pivot to literary thriller, set against the hothouse of adolescent angst, following one woman's reckoning with her involvement in her rival's past, who is found dead on campus. Junior High never leaves you. And Rachel Nardelli's early adolescent days have come back to haunt her when her long-time rival Alison Petrucci is found dead at Pleasant pond. This is where Rachel had last seen her in eighth grade, before Alison was punt off to private school. And before Alison seemed to have followed her to Denman. What bothers Rachel most, though, is that the night before Alison's murder, Rachel had said something to her. Something mean. It was a callback to their Junior High days, when all she'd wanted was to be free from Alison. But Rachel didn't want her to die . . . As Rachel joins her journalism crew to investigate the murder, and the town rages on for Alison, Rachel is forced to reckon with a troubled past she thought she'd long left behind. A brilliantly incisive and resonant story that is at once about class, gender, and the arbitrary nature of violence, Until Alison, inspired by real events, is the novel Kate Russo was always meant to write"--

Book Synopsis

"Empowering, heartbreaking, and thrilling in equal measure." --Ivy Pochoda, award-winning author of Sing Her Down and Ecstasy

"A deft and compulsively readable storyteller." --Claire Lombardo, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had and Same As It Ever Was

The night Alison was murdered, Rachel could have stopped it.

When Rachel Nardelli learns that Alison Petrucci--her childhood rival--is found dead in Pleasant Pond, the same place the two girls had first said "goodbye" to each other back in eighth grade, the town of Waterbury is outraged by the fear of losing one of their own--the heir to Maine's largest construction company. But Alison's death is a little more complicated for Rachel. She'd seen Alison the night she died. She'd said something she shouldn't have, had callously stirred up the past. And the next morning, Alison was gone.

Plagued by the long-barbed memories surrounding Alison, Rachel joins her journalism crew to investigate the murder. But as she's forced to revisit their fraught relationship, she falls into a web of cruelties that threatens to undo everything she understood about her past.

A psychological drama from the acclaimed Kate Russo, Until Alison is a brilliantly incisive and resonant novel that is at once about class, gender, and the arbitrary nature of violence.

Review Quotes

"This angst-filled, relationship-driven story is a good choice for readers of Jojo Moyes, Sally Rooney, and Gail Honeyman." --Booklist (audiobook review)

"Russo's plotting has the deliberateness of a fine latticework, and she handles teenage Rachel's recalcitrant cohort marvelously, somehow making each of a half-dozen adolescent voices distinct." --Portland Press Herald

"[Until Alison] is an incisive, painfully detailed account of childhood cruelty using the murder as a framing device. . . . as a story reliving the painful but illuminative melodramas of youth, the novel shines." --Chicago Review of Books

"[A]n exploration of adolescent friendship, bullying, and social pressures, plus the guilt that follows these broken relationships . . . Celebrates and empowers the women who bear witness to injustice and tell about it." --Kirkus Reviews

"[A] chilling literary thriller . . . Russo's sharp prose and layered characters create a gripping, quietly unsettling story you won't soon forget." --Hey Rhody

"Lovers of subtle psychological dramas about the interior lives of young women will be captivated by Until Alison's honesty." --BookPage

"Russo's sophomore novel and thriller debut is a thought-provoking and incisive treatise on the sum of a life's choices, the crippling and long-term effects of bullying, and the general dangers of being a woman . . . [F]or readers who enjoy intense suspense novels with unreliable narrators, such as those by Stacey Willingham and Paula Hawkins." --Booklist

"[An] earnest meditation on teen angst and adult regret . . . Russo's elegiac novel offers moving considerations of forgiveness and the often thorny nature of female friendship." --Publishers Weekly

"Until Alison so vibrantly captures a particular time and place in life--with its nostalgia, its tension, its fine-tuned depiction of class. Kate Russo is a deft and compulsively readable storyteller." --Claire Lombardo, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had and Same As It Ever Was

"Kate Russo reminds us, both perfectly and painfully, of the angst, jealousy, and self-doubt of youth. The strength of Until Alison lies in her ability to bring fury and compassion to both the bullied and the bullies." --Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Tom Lake

"Until Alison is a powerful and wrenching mystery that claws through the polite facade of the traditional campus novel. Kate Russo has delivered a fierce and furious story about the cruelty of youth that is empowering, heartbreaking, and thrilling in equal measure." --Ivy Pochoda, award-winning author of Sing Her Down and Ecstasy

"Is silence violence? That's the question that propels Kate Russo's gripping and incisive new novel set on a perfectly rendered college campus. Suffused with sexuality and the potent brew of class and gender, Until Alison expertly explores the moral complexity at the heart of a missing girl case." --Daisy Alpert Florin, author of My Last Innocent Year

"Instantly earning a place in the canon of dead girl college campus novels, Kate Russo's Until Alison is a chillingly readable tale about adolescent cruelty, popularity, and class. When the body of her former classmate, Alison, is discovered at a local swimming hole, Rachel Nardelli embarks on a reluctant exhumation of their friendship, capturing in forensic detail the horrors of eighth-grade rivalry, and how far teenagers will go in the name of self-preservation. Exposing the tension between the crimes we commit in our youth and the people we become as adults, Until Alison is a masterclass in middle school angst." --Ellie Eaton, author of The Divines

"The perfect challenge to the sepia-toned escapism of your standard campus murder-mystery. The cruelties and compromises of youth and the menace of rape culture are under the magnifying glass in this bold, confronting thriller." --Kate Weinberg, author of The Truants and There's Nothing Wrong with Her

About the Author

Kate Russo is the author of Super Host and Until Alison. She grew up in Maine but now divides her time between there and the United Kingdom. Also an artist, she exhibits in both the US and UK.