Summary: Allegedly

The GIST

Allegedly by Tiffany D. Jackson begins with a sentence nobody wants to read: Mary B. Addison killed a baby. Then comes the word that hangs over every page that follows. Allegedly. Published in January 2017 by Katherine Tegen Books, this young adult thriller follows a sixteen-year-old Black girl who was convicted as a small child of killing a white infant, and who has never, until now, told anyone what really happened.

It is a page-turner with a famous sting in its tail, but its reputation rests on something larger. Jackson uses Mary's case to show how the juvenile justice system treats the children it locks up, how the media decides who is guilty before a jury does, and how hard it is to climb out once the world has settled on who you are. Reviewers call it gritty, heartbreaking and eye-opening. One blogger says she stared at a blank page for two minutes before she could begin her review; several admit to turning straight back to the earlier chapters once they had read the last.

The Story

The crime

The facts everyone agrees on are few. Years ago, a baby named Alyssa died while in the care of a churchgoing Black woman and her young daughter, who were babysitting. The daughter, Mary, said almost nothing in her first interview with detectives. The press filled the silence with the only details it cared about: a white baby, a Black child. The public made up its mind, and a jury made it official. Mary was nine when she was convicted. Girls are not supposed to be killers, the thinking went, and so the world did not know what to do with this one except put her away.

The group home

Now she is sixteen. After years behind bars she has been moved to a group home, where she must live on probation until she turns eighteen. Calling it a home is generous. The other girls are all there for reasons of their own, and they are vicious. They hurl abuse at one another and sometimes mean to kill. A cat is found dead and mutilated. One girl throws boiling oil and water in another's face. More than once Mary fears for her life. The women who run the place are little better and are not above hitting the girls themselves. Mary's way of surviving is to stay small and quiet and count the days. She does not expect a birthday cake. As she puts it: "Hard to celebrate the day you were born when everybody seems to wish you were never born at all."

Momma

Her Momma visits every couple of weeks, loving on the surface and somehow absent underneath. She is distant and in denial, and she offers no real support. The relationship is strained and awkward, yet Mary's faith in her is childlike and stubborn, the kind that makes a reader want to shake her and hug her at once. Through flashbacks we learn that Mary's early years were far from safe. There was abuse at her mother's hands. There was a boyfriend of her mother's who drank and who kept trying to get at Mary. There are scars that are more than a figure of speech.

Ted and the SAT

There is one bright place in Mary's week. She has a part-time job at a nursing home, and there she meets Ted, a boy with a troubled history who lives in a group home of his own. Their romance is rough around the edges and believable. Ted has made some poor choices, and he can be rough with Mary in ways she has learned to think of as normal, but he catches himself, and he is trying to become better than where he came from. He looks after her as nobody else ever has. He is also about to turn eighteen, which in this system means being put out with nowhere to go.

Mary has plans too. She is quietly bright, and she wants to take the SAT and go to college. Vocabulary words from her studying are sprinkled through her narration. But every door has a catch. She cannot attend a regular high school. She cannot afford a prep book. A counselor advises her not to bother applying to college at all. She does not even have the identification needed to sit for the test. A kind tutor helps where she can, at one point literally giving Mary the clothes off her back, and a woman named Claire offers advice without judging her. Kindness is rare enough here to be startling.

A reason to speak

Then Mary discovers she is pregnant. The state, looking at her record, threatens to take the baby. She cannot bear it. "You ever smell a newborn?" she asks at one point, and she talks about how new babies do not know who you are or what you have done, and love you anyway.

For years there seemed no point in setting the record straight. Now there is every reason. Mary decides to speak. She finds a lawyer, Cora, skilled and principled, who believes her and works hard to reopen the case. Mary's claim is simple and explosive: she did not kill Alyssa.

Jackson threads the present-day story with pieces of the file: trial documents, interview transcripts, reports, and excerpts from the sensational coverage that turned a child into a monster. Alongside them come Mary's own memories of that night, which arrive in fragments and grow more detailed as the book goes on. The trouble is that she is not sure she can trust them. She is not sure she can trust the system that was so eager to put a nine-year-old behind bars. Most painfully, she is not sure she can trust Momma, the one other person who was in that house, and the one person whose word could now save Mary and her child.

So the fight to keep her baby becomes a fight over the past. In the background is Alyssa's mother, Mrs. Richardson, who has come apart since her daughter's death and now drinks and smokes her way through the days. As a new hearing approaches, life in the group home grows more dangerous, Ted's situation gets shakier, and the question in the title presses harder with every chapter. Nobody knows the real Momma. Does anyone know the real Mary? The answer is the book's to give.

What It's Really About

Who gets believed. Mary's race, her age and her silence were all read against her, and the documents Jackson includes show a child being discussed as something less than a child. The book is blunt about how race shaped both the coverage and the verdict. It also shows how a label sticks: once society has decided what you are, shaking that image off is close to impossible, for Mary and for every other girl in the house.

What happens after punishment. Jackson lays out the trap in practical detail: no schooling worth the name, no job prospects, no papers, no place to live at eighteen. The obstacles look small one at a time and are crushing together. Children in the system, the novel suggests, are left with little choice except to repeat the mistakes that put them there, just to survive. Ted, turned out of his group home at eighteen and made homeless, is the proof.

Mothers and children. What does a mother owe her child, and what will a child forgive? The book circles the old question of whether a person is born bad or made that way by the people and places that raise her. One reviewer notes that children who do terrible things have usually been shown how. Another comes away asking whether parents should stand trial alongside their children. Jackson gives no comfortable answer.

Trauma. Abuse, post-traumatic stress, mental illness and the long ripple of one loss through many lives all run through the story. Nearly every character is damaged, the grieving mother included.

Hope. For all its darkness the book carries hope. Whatever is put in front of Mary, she keeps finding a way around it, and a few decent adults show what a difference one advocate can make. Its plainest message is to speak up for yourself and to keep working toward something stable, however bad things have been.

Readers love it for Mary's voice, guarded and careful and painfully honest, told in rough, believable street talk, and for a late turn that has left many gasping and flipping back to hunt for what they missed. One reviewer describes Jackson as a puppeteer, in full control of every emotion the reader feels. Not everyone is persuaded by the ending: some find the last chapters rushed, one reviewer thinks the twist throws the book off course and should have been prepared earlier, and some feel the relentless cruelty of the group home grows repetitive. Few forget it.

Who Should Read It

Older teens and adults who want a thriller with real weight behind it. The content is harsh: violence, abuse, constant strong language and sexual situations, and one family-media guide recommends it for ages fourteen and up. If you are drawn to stories about wrongful convictions, or you want young adult fiction that looks squarely at race, poverty and the justice system, this one will stay with you long after the last page, and it will give a book club or a classroom a great deal to argue about.