The nitty-gritty: A fun, fast-paced thriller about the conspiracy theories behind 9/11, this contemporary YA will give teens (and adults!) plenty to think about.

I don’t usually read YA thrillers, but when Geoffrey Girard asks you to read his book, you do! I have to admit I don’t know much about conspiracy theories—although my sixteen year old daughter tells me about plenty (I think it might be a teenager thing…)—but it sure was a blast reading about them, especially since Girard’s latest focuses on the conspiracy theories behind the events of 9/11. Truthers is definitely slanted toward the YA crowd—there’s some burgeoning romance and plenty of teen slang—but I can honestly say that it had some unexpected layers, and I ended up learning a lot. Add in some pulse-pounding action and you have a great mix.

Katie Wallace’s father has just been committed to Ventworth Hospital, after attacking a coworker. Coupled with his PTSD from his time in the military and his rantings about conspiracy theories, Scott Wallace is being heavily sedated and the administrators won’t let Katie see him. When she finally gets a few minutes to talk to him, though, he barely makes any sense, repeating over and over the cryptic words “They killed all of them.” Katie is taken into foster care, since she’s underage, but even this drastic life change won’t deter her from trying to help her father and discover the mystery behind his puzzling words.

A man from Veterans Affairs named Paul Cobb begins questioning Katie, trying to find out if her father has told her anything, and through these conversations Katie starts to realize that her father once worked for a company that may have had something to do with a 9/11 cover up. As she pieces together the confusing ramblings of her father and the suspicious actions of Paul Cobb, Katie begins to wonder if her dad might be telling the truth. Were hundreds of people who knew too much killed in order to hide the truth of what really happened that fateful day? How was her father involved? And even more unsettling, how does Katie herself fit into the picture? Her father mentioned something about a woman handing a baby to him in order to save her, and Katie suspects she might have been that child.

Before she knows it, Katie is knee-deep in conspiracy theories and trying to find a lawyer who will agree to help her father get out of Ventworth. Along with a young law student named Max, her best friend Gianna and even her new foster siblings, Katie doggedly looks for answers, stepping out of her comfort zone in order to discover the truth. But someone is watching her every move, someone who doesn’t want to leave any loose ends.

I personally have never paid much attention to conspiracy theories, and although I’ve heard the odd thing here or there about 9/11, I was never interested enough to read up on them. But it turns out there is a whole group of people who think that enough proof exists to present alternate stories of what might have actually happened, and I found it interesting that the title is based on a real group of people called “truthers” who literally spend their lives searching for the truth. Whether you believe it or not, it’s fascinating to read about, and Girard keeps a level head as he’s telling his story by presenting both sides and giving them equal page time. If you’re hoping for concrete answers by the end of the book, well I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. Nothing is really resolved, although the characters do learn plenty. The author also drops tantalizing hints about other conspiracies throughout our country’s history that seriously made me want to do some Googling to learn more!

I loved Katie as a character, she’s curious, loyal to her father, and determined to get to the bottom of what really happened during 9/11. She also dives headlong into dangerous situations, which made her character a bit less believable, but it certainly made for a fun story. While Katie is open-minded and prone to believe conspiracy theories in general, her friend Max is the opposite. He has a hard time believing that the U.S. government could ever lie to its people, especially when it comes to 9/11. Max jumps in and agrees to help Katie with her research, but he’s there mostly for moral support. He’s not buying the proclamations spouted by conspiracy nuts, and I liked that he balanced Katie out with his levelheaded attitude.

The other thing I really enjoyed was the fact that Katie has to stay with a foster family while her father is in Ventworth. I honestly can’t remember ever reading a story that dealt with foster care, and while it certainly isn’t the focus of this story, it felt very real and honest. While Katie isn’t thrilled with the rules and curfews her foster parents set for her, it worked much better than if she had just been able to stay at home by herself. Plus she becomes good friends with one of her foster sisters!

A couple of things didn’t work as well for me, but overall I consider them minor. As Katie is delving into the 9/11 conspiracies and trying to get her father released, we find out that someone seems to be watching her every move. Katie’s story is broken up by short scenes of “mystery” men talking about “stopping” Katie from finding out the truth, following her, and even using surveillance equipment to spy on her and Max. Although these scenes did add some suspense to the story, I found them a bit over-the-top for my taste. There is also something that happens to Katie’s cat that did not sit well with me. That whole scenario, although it did turn out better that I expected, just didn’t feel like it belonged in this story.

But despite those issues, Girard certainly knows how to pace his story. There’s plenty of excitement throughout, especially the last few chapters when everything comes to a head. Several things are resolved, but the bigger questions aren’t, leaving lots of room for readers to draw their own conclusions. I loved the way Girard was able to add serious themes like PTSD, mental illness, foster care and even drug use to a fast-paced story that never felt bogged down by those things. Truthers is both entertaining and educational, which for me is a winning combination.

Big thanks to the publisher for supplying a review copy.

Truthers started out really strong. Katie is thrust into a new life when her veteran father is admitted into a mental health facility. With a great foster family, the change isn't so bad until she begins investigating her father's claim that Katie is the sole survivor of a 9/11 conspiracy theory event. Katie does a bunch of investigating, meets some interesting characters along the way, and teaches us all about conspiracy theories. Somewhere along the way (about 45% of the way through), the book began to lose its luster for me. It just moved so slowly! I really had to force myself to come back to it just so I knew how it ended.

Scheduled to post 7/15/17.

My interest was piqued with TRUTHERS, however, when I started reading I was very afraid of where the book was going to go. I have huge problems with people capitalizing on 9/11 in the form of entertainment, like fictionalized books or movies. Same goes for other big tragedies, like the BP rig explosion and that movie with Mark Wahlberg. Gross. No. You're making money on the backs of dead people with survivors still alive to tell you exactly what happened. No.

So I was afraid because 9/11 is very close to me. I don't like to call myself a survivor because I wasn't downtown when it happened. I was in my dorm at 55th between 2nd and 3rd, having been dropped off eight days prior for my freshman year of college. I don't feel like I actually survived anything being that far uptown, yet it's such a monumental moment in my life that I'm still to this day grossly affected by it. I didn't witness the planes crashing into the buildings or see the towers collapsing, but I can tell you how yellow the air was the next day when the wind shifted and what thousands of burning bodies and cement and steel and asbestos and office equipment smells like. How long it stuck to our hair and our clothes, how news anchors advised people to stay indoors. I can tell you it took between 7 and 8 hours to get a hold of my parents that day because cell services were jammed, pay phones were for emergency only, and no one had long distance on their dorm phones. So my parents had no idea whether I was alive or dead. I can tell you what a silent New York City feels like, what hordes of people walking across the Queensboro looked like because the island was locked down. What's it like to walk in streets that were previously flat but were now rippled and bulging because of the underground force created by the falling towers. I can tell you what it's like to have a fundraiser variety show for one of our friends whose dad, who didn't work in the towers but were nearby, ran in to help people and never came out. They buried an empty coffin that November and in March his body was finally extracted from the wreckage, intact.

I know our government's down some really shitty things, but I can't accept that they would allow something like this to happen let alone actually orchestrated it. So I had a hard time going into this book, and I had a hard time writing what I did above, and I was afraid of what Girard was going to do. My 18-year-old self was very directly affected by 9/11 and my 34-year-old-self now is very protective of that piece of me. But I gave it a chance.

And once things started working out and cracks started to form, I stopped reading the book as if I were anticipating a hit. I waited until the very end to see how he would tie everything together just so I didn't jump the gun and was like WHEW. TRUTHERS ended in a very satisfying place. Not one where I anticipated it ending, but a respectful place.

The basic premise is Katie's dad has been not well for a long time and at his last breakdown before being hospitalized he drops a bomb: that we was involved in a secret conspiracy to orchestrate 9/11 and Katie is really the daughter of a woman off of Flight 93 who handed her over to him to save before the woman was carted off and murdered by the government. This is at the front of the book, and it's a very insulting conspiracy which was why I was so apprehensive going into it. I was really hoping the book would ultimately be a comment on mental illness, which is kind of ends up being. It just takes a while for that point to develop.

So here's the thing: conspiracies are not mathematically viable. Effectively the more people who know a secret the less amount of time that secret is going to stay a secret. That article effectively proves that based on prior real conspiracies that did come to light. The thing about covert operations is that very few people know about them. Exceedingly few. That's to mitigate leaks. There is stuff that's buried very deeply within the government that not even Julian Assange can get his hands on. The shit the government really doesn't want people to know, they hide it well. Everything else . . . well, the government at large is terrible at keeping secrets, if you couldn't already tell.

One of Katie's contacts, a guy with the handle Benevolus522, states that people who know too much and who are deemed a threat by the government get eliminated. That's not untrue. However the government actually needs to think you're a threat with the information you know. Ben here's been working on his truther crap for more than a decade and he considers himself hunkered down under hacker protection from the government and in hiding. 1) Hubris to think his tech skills are better than the government's when it comes to spycraft. Ha. 2) By that same logic if he was actually on to anything he'd already be dead. Since he's not, by that logic, he knows jack shit. But, you know. Truthers aren't logical so that concept flies right out the window.

Max is a leveling factor throughout the story, poking holes in Katie's logic the entire time and he really grounds it all out. He waters down every truther concept, picks it up and turns it around so it can be seen from the other side of the coin. He's really the voice of reason as Katie devolves into this whole mess.

As for Katie herself, she gets points for the research she does and the time spent. The crux of this whole thing, as outlined by one of the cases she found, it to prove that the truther conspiracies are believable by people of sound judgment and mind, not just by "crazies." And this is brought up very early on in the story so if you hang on to this notion, keep it in the back of your mind, it'll help you carry through everything, from the cut-aways to the "men in black" talking about spying on her to the questionable scare tactic moments that arise. She's also a vaguely inconsistent character, but that's just one mention that really stood out: considering 9/11 ancient history, however, she quotes the movie Se7en, which is even older than that event. Literally before her time. But whatever. Small hiccup, ultimately.

There are a lot of hidden pieces in TRUTHERS that if I start talking about them they'll just be outright spoilers. So I'll just end it with this: it's a book that ultimately keeps its distance. 9/11 is THE BIG THING in the book, but that's not how it ends. Girard is respectful and ends up making various comments about the mentality around conspiracies, PTSD, mental illness, and persistence toward truth. It started off rough and ended quite well. I would recommend giving it a chance.

He puts a note at the end, before the bibliography, just commenting on the sites and books he referenced when researching the book and how it's not an endorsement, just a research list. InfoWars is on there and it made me twitch. Ugh. Talk about conspiratorial drivel. I'm sorry he had to go there, but I think it shows the lengths to which he went in order to understand the mentality of that side of thinking and even that isn't presented in a mocking way in the book, but just as another way of thinking without being disrespectful to those directly affected by 9/11.

So if you're looking at the blurb and you're skeptical in a way that I was, give TRUTHERS a chance. You might be surprised.

4.5

So, I've said before that for some reason I love conspiracy theories. Do I believe any of them? No. I don't but they are interesting to look up. So when I saw this one on NetGalley, I had to get it. I learned nothing new from it but someone who knows nothing about the the conspiracy that 9/11 was an inside job will learn lots. This actually leads me to the first problem I have: info dumping. It got pretty boring in some parts of this book for that reason. I get it, she would go look up all these things and it made sense for the info dumping but it didn't make it any less boring.

Also the drugs... I'm not a fan of drugs and her father was big into weed. I pushed past that because I'd never seen a YA book like this one before and it does make sense why he did it but I still don't like that. Overall, this is a good book for anyone who likes 9/11 conspiracy theories.

I actually enjoyed this book a lot more than I expected to. I'm not a big conspiracy theory person, but the characters were written really well, and the internal conflicts of the main character, and even her father were really well done, despite the plot line.

Review: TRUTHERS by Geoffrey Girard

I loved this novel! I selected it because of its theme, and it not only equalled, but surpassed my expectations. A one-sitting, nonstop thriller, TRUTHERS focuses on a fifteen-year-old Maryland girl, Kaitlyn Wallace, raised from toddlerhood by a single dad, a blue-collar worker with undiagnosed PTSD and issues with substance abuse. Sound ordinary? Not at all. Scott Wallace is a secretive "Truther," who is convinced the events of September 11, 2001 were consequences of an "inside job."

When a governmental agency (covert) institutionalizes Scott via involuntary commitment, Kaitlyn is sent to a foster home. Those incarcerating and interrogating Scott Wallace in the psychiatric ward don't realize that growing up in a dysfunctional home has developed in Kaitlyn a strong nature, a strong will, and an independence of which many adults could be envious. She determines to arrange her father's release, no matter what, and that includes her serious study of the continuum of belief about those events. Katie goes where many would fear to tread; she is basically unstoppable. While readers are cheering her on, they will also be thinking critically, analyzing, and pondering. This novel deserves reading--and rereading.

Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I feel like up top I should probably throw out the fact that if you are going to be bothered by discussions of conspiracy theories about 9/11, this book is definitely not for you.  The author does a wonderful job addressing this  in the afterword (he discusses that teens who weren't alive for 9/11 are often interested in the conspiracy theories and he wanted to address those interests along with other information about it), but I think it's important to know up front because it was the one thing that kind of bothered me throughout the book and tarnished it a little bit for me.  I knew that would be part of the book but I guess I did not realize how much it would gnaw at me as I was reading that a lot of ideas brought up in the book had to do with the tragedy being a false flag or inside job and the like.

That aside, I think that the book actually handles the issue relatively well.  Truthers is about Katie, a girl trying to create a defense for her father who has been arrested for an outburst about 9/11 and threatening Dick Cheney.  Only a high school student, she throws all she has into the task trying of to mount a defense that just because her father might believe in conspiracy theories does not mean that he is a threat to others and should therefore be let off.  It is an interesting framing and does a nice job of taking Katie from being a skeptic to being someone who is much more doubting of the official story.  As a character, Katie is quite earnest which I found to be important to make rooting for her feel appropriate.  I felt that her best friend was not very well fleshed out but with that one notable exception, I thought most of the characters were fairly well developed.

Max is a law student wunderkind who decides to help Katie out with her case.  He is a nice foil for Katie as he remains more resolute in believing the official story of 9/11.  He provided some much needed perspective both in the universe of the book and just to me as the reader, who almost had to put it down because (as mentioned above) the book dabbles with being disrespectful to the victims of 9/11.  Also, Max being a complete and unabashed nerd referencing Tolkien immediately endeared him to me.

Overall, if you are someone interested in conspiracy theories, I think you will quite enjoy this book.  If you are neutral about them it's a decent YA story that is worth a read but not essential.  If you can't stomach the suggestion of alternate theories about the events of 9/11, this is a hard pass.

Katie never believed in her dad -- he let her down too many times to count. His bad combination of drugs and alcohol left Katie picking up his responsibilities all throughout her childhood, forcing her to learn that the only person she could depend on is herself. When the police bring Child Services to her front door, Katie isn't shocked, knowing it was only a matter of time. What she didn't expect was to hear her dad has been admitted to a mental institution due to a violent encounter with coworkers and claims of 9/11 conspiracies involving former vice president Dick Cheney. Katie remembers her dad spouting "truther" conspiracies sporadically, mostly when he was either drunk or high. But when her dad shares a dark secret with her, she finds herself thrust into a world of lies, half-truths, and corruption. Now Katie must figure out if her dad could be telling the truth -- which would shake up her world completely -- or if he really is in the place where he belongs.

THOUGHTS: Girard's novel had me riveted and horrified all at the same time. Like many reading this review, I remember 9/11 very clearly -- I can tell you where I was when each plane crashed, how I felt when each tower crumbled before the world's very eyes, and how my friends, family, and students were directly affected by what happened that terrible day. To read this fictional character, Katie, explore all-to-real "truther" points-of-view, I was so upset by how plausible it all seemed. I have never given credence to the "truther" movement before and I cannot say this book has convinced me to believe in any way, nor was that the author's intent, however I can see how easily it would be to get caught up in it all, just like Katie was. I would recommend this to any high school teacher who is looking to get their students more involved in questioning the world around them, even if it means questioning their own government.

Katie never even thinks about 9/11. She was barely a year old when terrorist hijackers flew airliners into the World Trade Center. But when her father is institutionalized because of his belief that the attack was an inside job, Katie becomes drawn into the strange and scary world of conspiracy theorists. With respectful and careful footsteps, Truthers brings the reader into that world, too, leading to questions about patriotism, civic duty, and the effects belief can have on those around us.

Thank You Net galley for the free ARC.

One day Katie comes home and her dad has had a nervous breakdown and has been locked up in a hospital. He was never too good with reality ever since he served time in the war. When she visits him, he tells her that he is not her dad and that they killed them all.
Is this her dad's fantasy or did something really happen all those years ago and did it have something to do with 9//11?

Katie Wallace attempts to save her father from a mental institution by research his claims that he was involved in the coverup of 9/11.

Well written and thought provoking, Truthers is a challenging read for anyone who remembers the tragedy of 9/11..

Truthers tells the story of Katie, who lives with her pothead, drunk-off-his-ass dad. Until, one day, she doesn't anymore. She comes home to see that the nice young men in their clean white coats have come and taken her dad away (does anyone get that song reference or am I just that old?). Katie goes into foster care and stays with a fabulous family. No, I'm serious about that. However, when she finally gets to see her dad, her dad starts talking about knowing the Truth about 9/11 and how Katie is the key to figuring everything out. Katie ultimately decides to trust her father, and the journey she goes on is more twisted than you could ever imagine.

To be honest, I quite enjoyed Truthers. Katie, our protagonist, is a likable character. She learns and grows. The author does a great job of making her sarcastic without turning her into a total bitch. The supporting characters in the text are, for the most part, also well fleshed out and believable. (Minus the one friend that keeps appearing and disappearing. Katie keeps mentioning having two best friends, however, we only spend time with one of them. Go figure.)

The author does a great job of delving into the conspiracies that surround 9/11; the book is well-researched and the author even includes a bibliography for those who want to learn more. For the generation that this book is written for - those who were born after 9/11 occurred - will find this book interesting.

I only have two real complaints about the book, and I'm hoping that one is because I read an ARC, is that the formatting is a bit wonky at time. The narration point of view switches occasionally, and there was no line breaks or any way to tell when the narration had jumped. Therefore, it often took me a minute or two to realize that jump had occurred.

My second complaint is the resolution. I don't want to give too much away as it will lead to a huge spoiler for the book, but let's just say it wasn't very clear and left me feeling a bit confused.

Overall, if you're into mysteries and conspiracy theories, chances are you'll enjoy this book. It's definitely a quick, easy read so it's worth a second glance.

A decent story, a bit of a mystery along with historical fiction. It was a bit too conspiracy theorist for my liking, but it's well written with likable characters.

As the story opens Katie's father is taken to a mental hospital - this isn't all that surprising to Katie, her father's always been a little unhinged. What is surprising to Katie is that her father has seemed a little more unhinged than usual lately. He's been talking about 9/11, about how it was a cover-up by the government and how he was involved in that cover-up. Then he tells Katie that she is a survivor from one of the planes that crashed on 9/11. As shocking as all of this is to Katie, she is more worried about getting her father out of the psychiatric hospital. Part of that process means learning more about 9/11 and the claims her father is making. But the deeper Katie gets the more people she finds that don't seem to want her to dig any deeper.

This is a fun read. Part mystery/detective story, part historical fiction, part realistic fiction - and it works well.