Book Review: Twenty-Seven Minutes by Ashley Tate

The town of West Wilmer never really got over the death of Phoebe Dean ten years ago. Bright and popular, she was expected to go far and put her small town’s name on the map. Instead, the truck she was in crashed on the town bridge one rainy night. She bled out on the asphalt, and nothing in West Wilmer was ever the same again.

Since then, plenty of questions have been directed at the truck’s driver, Phoebe’s older brother Grant. There’d been a twenty-seven-minute delay between the vehicle crashing and Grant calling for help. Plenty of people still believe that if he’d called emergency services sooner, Phoebe’s life might have been saved.

As children, Grant had promised Phoebe that they would leave town together, working their way to bigger vistas and better opportunities. But the pressures of high school took their toll on Grant, who was relying on football scouts to pry him out of West Wilmer. Phoebe had gone nearly wild with frustration, trying to keep him on the straight and narrow and away from the girls she feared would keep him tied to their birthplace. 

Becca Hoyt was one of those girls. She’s also the only witness to what really happened that night on the bridge, or so she believes. Since then, she’s kept the secrets Grant has asked of her, out of a perhaps misguided belief in his enduring love:

How could Grant sacrifice so much for her ten years ago but treat her so poorly now? That stormy night had many facets, but had she not protected him, just as he had her, by keeping some of those truths to herself? He’d been the one driving, had he not? He’d let his sister die, had he not? Becca had lived for ten years with the unbearable burden of guilt of what Grant had done out of love for her, and yet she was still overlooked and ignored in town.

 

Becca was tired of being invisible in her own story; she was owed more than what Grant was giving.

Becca isn’t the only person suffering from the aftereffects of that night. The crash injured Grant’s leg, ending his football career and keeping him in the same household as the mother he and Phoebe had once planned to flee. When that same mother decides that she wants to hold a ten-year memorial service for her lost daughter, Grant and Becca’s grief and guilt can no longer be kept separate from each other’s, as the memorial intensifies and focuses the entire town’s emotions.

Into this already combustible mix comes June Delroy, their classmate back in high school. June’s brother Wyatt left their family on the same day as the accident. Several years later, their father followed suit. June’s mother has only recently died of cancer, leaving June bereft and even more broken down than she was while her mother was alive. When Wyatt finally comes home, June is both overwhelmed with happiness and filled with questions. Even though she’s glad he’s back, she can’t help but feel resentful still of the circumstances surrounding his departure:

But where Wyatt had been for the last ten years, after running away the night of a terrible fight with their father, June didn’t know. The help they needed from the sheriff to look for Wyatt, to find wherever he’d slunk off to and then drag him home, as they had done several times before, hadn’t been available because of that car accident. Their town was too small for more than one problem, she supposed, and they’d chosen her. Phoebe Dean. She’d drained all of the resources and air and sympathy, and all that June’s family was left with was an empty chair at their table and a steady stream of questions that would never be answered.

When Becca, Wyatt, and June each decide they need to go to Phoebe’s memorial in search of closure, Grant is unprepared to deal with all of them at once. He’s spent the last decade hiding what really happened that night. Will he be able to hold out even longer in the face of all their demands, or will the horrific truth finally come to the surface and change all their lives forever?

Ashley Tate draws on her memories of visiting her grandmother’s small town to bring West Wilmer to life, in this tale of suffocating secrets and dreams destroyed. I had the most sympathy for Becca, whose belief in the power of love, no matter how deluded, was at least rooted in a desire for kindness and good. It probably helped that she was the only character who thought that Phoebe was as insufferable as I did.

The pacing up to the big reveal is also wonderfully done, really infusing tension into the proceedings. Twenty-Seven Minutes is a debut novel has a lot to say about the ways that grief and guilt can haunt the inhabitants of an insular community, and how important it is for the truth to finally be told.