True Colors

by Kristin Hannah

Cancer had come into their family and broken it into so many separate pieces it seemed impossible they would ever be whole again.

A big sister was supposed to take care of her siblings.

years later, when she looked back on that week of her mother’s death, Winona saw how that single action—the handing over of a lead rope—had changed everything. From then on, jealousy had become an undercurrent, swirling beneath their lives. But no one had seen it. Not then, at least.

Some things couldn’t be forgotten, no matter how hard you tried. Humiliation. Loss. Jealousy. They were buoyant emotions that kept popping to the surface. In the end, you grew too tired to keep them submerged.

Color faded the landscape. Even the evergreens lost some of their rich hue, appearing black against the gray sky, gray clouds, and gray water.

It was funny how a song, or a dance, or a look passed between sisters could give the whole of your life back to you.

He looked up at her, grinning gummily.

If the child is almost 4 years old, his grin will be toothy, not gummy. An editor should have caught this. I had to go back & reread this section, because I thought I might have been mistaken about how much time had passed

On the wall, the minutes ticked past.

Here’s another statement that bothered me. Minutes tick past on a CLOCK, not on a WALL. Trivial, I KNOW….. but a good editor would catch these things.

The famed Space Needle and the once-renowned Smith Tower, now the bookends of the city instead of its proud twin masts, looked smaller and older each day.

a funny failure was as durable and reusable as plastic.

Trends came and went, the words changed with the generations, but how girls expressed themselves remained the same: with bright colors and glued-on glitter.

One of the things about their past was this: the baggage might be stored in the dark, but it was still in the house.

There might be an animal called absolute truth, but it couldn’t be caged and certainly didn’t roam the halls of justice.

Normally Winona would have filled the silence with nervous talk, saying anything to avoid nothing, but in the past months she’d learned a thing or two about words. Sometimes you needed to wait for the ones that mattered.

I cheered when those convictions were overturned due to DNA testing. With a little more research into the topic, I began to realize how difficult the system makes it for convicts to have these tests run. Obviously, no one wants to set guilty people free, but the idea that innocent people are sitting behind bars, having lost all hope, is intolerable.

This novel is set in a secret, practically unknown corner of Washington State.

The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.