The Truth About Truman School by Dori Hillestad Butler

The Truth About Truman School by Dori Hillestad Butler is a young adult novel about cyberbullying. When Zebby and her best friend Amr create a website to encourage other students at Truman Middle School to share their own stories the website quickly degenerates into a forum for gossip and eventually abuse. Things spiral beyond their control in the name of freedom of speech and the two are simply too young to know where or when to draw the line.

Butler manages to communicate a story without becoming preachy or pedantic. She also tells a story that feels all to real. A sort of 21st century Lord of the Flies, the reader is easily drawn into the complicated relationship dynamics that one would assume can easily be found in middle schools across the country if not around the world.

However, I’ve experienced cyberbullying, having been on the receiving end of horrible abusive. Someone even went so far as to suggest that I had made up my mother’s breast cancer. And the person was presumably an adult, a former model cum lawyer who was happily married, etc.

So reading this novel, I went into it with a certain degree of skepticism. Could the author adequately convey the confusion and hurt of being bullied online, never being afforded the opportunity to face your attacker? Would the author make the victim of the bullying so sympathetic that he/she would become too saintly to be real? Fortunately, Butler manages to keep most of the characters from becoming such a cliché as to make the novel predictable. Well, at least not too terribly predictable. The big “gotcha” at the end wasn’t that big a surprise to me but I would think most readers would be in the dark for most of the novel.

There is a website associated with the novel with a message board to discuss cyberbullying, resources for teachers, and links to other websites about the subject.