cover image The Confessional

The Confessional

J. L. Powers, . . Knopf, $19.99 (294pp) ISBN 978-0-375-93872-6

Powers’s first novel powerfully combines timely story lines regarding illegal immigration, school violence and racial tension. The first of six narrators, MacKenzie Malone attends a Jesuit high school in El Paso, Tex., where most of the Mexican students have branded him a racist after the controversial letter to the editor he’s written appears in the local newspaper. Off his Ritalin (he’s traded it for coke) and unable to take the taunting, Mackenzie beats up a Mexican classmate so badly that the guy ends up in the hospital. That night Mackenzie, still narrating, is stabbed to death in his front yard. In subsequent chapters, six boys—among them witnesses, suspects, friends—react to the news and reveal their own disturbing secrets as they alternately narrate. On the surface, the characters fall into stock roles (the closeted gay friend, the brilliant kid hiding behind a stoner persona, the geeky outcast, the peacemaker, and so on), but the author carefully individuates their back stories even as she links the boys via their common fears. If some of the voices sound a little similar and if some of the action seems implausible, the psychological drama as a whole has enough depth and dimension to compensate. The structure Powers builds is ambitious, and she manipulates it for maximum surprise. Ages 14-up. (July)