Katie Nash is a 13-year-old girl trying to forgive herself for cruelly betraying her best friend, and the penance she adopts is cleaning her entire house--including the dreaded Venetian blinds. "Venetian blinds are what hang in hell," she tells herself, "and every day Satan says, 'My, my, I see we have some dust again.'"
Little moments of truth like this appear periodically in Elizabeth Berg's True to Form, a 10-year-old novel acting as a time machine to transport me back to early adolescence. Katie is the girl I wanted to be and perhaps thought I was when I was 13, from her writing to her tortured relationship with the Girl Scouts to her part-time job caring for an elderly woman. The novel is set in the early 1960s and it's difficult now to imagine than anyone could ever have been as young and naive and hopeful as Katie 'n' me, but throughout the book I recognized her feelings, resonated with her sense of burgeoning opportunity. Will it ever again be possible for anyone to be so young?
The ending is abrupt and the plot leans dangerously close to sappiness, but Berg creates a charming character and places her in a context that rings true in every particular. I wavered between wanting to warn Katie against the dangers of growing up and resting confident in her ability to weather the coming storms. The child in me joins her in saying "To hell with Venetian blinds" while the adult wants to remind her that if the worst thing that happens to you all summer is the need to dust the blinds, then the best thing to do is be happy and dust.
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