I was in a bookstore and saw Sometimes We Tell the Truth. On a whim, I bought it.  And while I knew nothing about it, early on, reading the second story within the story, I thought “This is ‘The Miller’s Tale’ from The Canterbury Tales.” I flipped to the back of the book to see if there was a note. There was. Sometimes is, in fact, a modern telling of Chaucer’s tales with teens as the pilgrims. Except that these pilgrims are not making a commitment to the Almighty. They are going to Washington D.C . on a six-hour bus trip with their Civics class teacher. 

Our narrator’s name is Jeff—obviously—and he has a lot of teen problems. He needs to repair his relationship with his ex-best friend (‘Pard,’ for the Pardoner); he has recently played a terrible prank on the Civics teacher who is chaperoning the trip and now feels guilty; and his new best friend—God knows why—is a total jerk who has been banned from the trip but will be in D.C. to tempt Jeff into also being a total jerk.

The group on the bus is pretty out of control. Before they even get moving, they are drinking beers on the bus and rolling the empty bottles down the aisle. Cookie (the Cook, whose tale is unfinished in the Canterbury Tales) is obviously stoned and falls asleep before finishing his story. Mr. Bailey, the teacher and the only one not to tell a tale, is stereotypically ineffectual. In order to get some control over the students, he tells them that they will each tell a story. The group will vote, and whoever has told the best story will get an A in the class. Many of the students are looking forward to going to elite colleges, so they are on board with this plan.

While the Canterbury Tales are quite entertaining, they become problematic in the setting of contemporary teens. Not because they feature sexual desire. Back in the day, my sophomore honors classes read “The Miller’s Tale” even though it includes cuckoldry and revenge. (We didn’t have national groups of scolds telling the rest of us what to do back then. The students’ parents were amused.) 

What is troublesome is that the students tell all these stories about sexual pranks and perfidy by placing each other in the tales. Students name each other as licentious, ugly, foolish, etc. They are bullying one another. While this type of bullying works with the pilgrims going to Canterbury (some of whom had not met before their journey), it’s pretty gut-churning when reimagined for teens who know one another and are on an official school field trip with a teacher chaperone. The completely useless teacher makes light objections, but always ‘allows it.’ And, recall, this is after keeping everyone on the bus even though he knows they have been drinking and one is stoned. In fact, early in, Mr. Bailey simply tells a student, “‘Oh, go on’” because he’s “totally hooked to find out what happens next.” 

The most worrisome part of the storytelling is when Alison, who appears to have a lot of sexual experience, tells her tale. She represents the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s tales. Recall that the Wife of Bath has been married five times, is quite lusty, and makes a case for female autonomy as well as a case against the church’s notion of chastity. Her tale is the story of a knight raping a girl, being sentenced to death and then offered a reprieve.

Alison tells of numerous boyfriends, which isn’t a problem. But she begins with the story of another field trip, this one to see the Liberty Bell when she is in sixth grade. Her group is driven by the older brother of one of the girls. Alison sees that he is staring at her breasts and she comes on to him. They have sex in the car and then begin an ‘affair’ (for lack of a better word) that carries on through the summer of her twelfth year, until Jeff goes off to college.

Jeff says, “I wonder why Mr. Bailey says nothing.” Well, Jeff, so do I. Because that’s statutory rape. Alison is well below the age of consent, no matter how she acts. In all 50 states and D.C., teachers are mandated reporters of abuse, including sexual abuse. Now Mr. Bailey isn’t just useless. He’s breaking the law and possibly endangering other kids. This happens a bit more than one-third of the way through the novel. It lost me right there. I finished the book because I wanted to see how the other tales played out, but it had lost credibility. 

While the premise for this novel is very interesting (I wanted to love it), it didn’t work for me both because the students named each other in their stories and because the teacher chaperone was a stick figure with no concern for his moral/ethical and legal duties. It might work for a student doing a compare/contrast project which requires them to read a classic and then a contemporary book based on that classic work.