The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial
An astoundingly well-calibrated mixture of legal reporting and literary analysis ... The Newland trials are rich texts, and Scott pores over every transcript page, looking for meaning.
Read Full Review >>
A strange kind of legal drama. The usual pleasures of reading about the courtroom—the vicarious thrill of being both detective and jury—give way to the slower burn of cultural analysis. Scott treats the tale of Gayle and Miss X as a rich and layered text, in which the inconsistencies are not lies to be triumphantly exposed but symbols to be recursively interpreted ... Characteristically, Scott avoids taking any hard stances. But her examples make clear that the interests of the powerful have always determined what kinds of lies are deemed to invalidate sexual consent.
Read Full Review >>
Probably because The Bed Trick was first published in Britain, where many readers knew how the story ended, Scott forfeits much of the potential narrative tension ... I found myself yearning for a version of the book where I didn’t know the outcome ... The courtroom never feels immediate in The Bed Trick ... Scott confesses to feeling 'frustrated by the transcripts,' which are marred by 'so many interruptions, narratives cut short and missing perspectives. There was so much I couldn’t see.' By the end of the book, the feeling was mutual.
Read Full Review >>
