Catherine Trieschmann's Crooked

Redemption and Sacrifice

Redemption is an exchange.  

We redeem our luggage by handing over the claim ticket.  

A deceiver redeems credibility by telling the truth.  

Or a better fiction.

And the fictions we tell as acts of redemption can be newly framed or borrowed. 

In Crooked, a fourteen-year-old girl crippled by trauma manages her changing world by creating her own fictions.  She writes stories.  And tells lies to fit the occasion.  She meets a sixteen-year-old girl who has stories of her own, borrowed from the world of her father, regarding the moral struggle between sin and salvation, the devious temptations of Satan, and rituals of penance and observance.

The justice of redemption resides in the fact that what is claimed belonged to one in the first place.  Yet it still requires faith that the reward is worth the trade-off.  

There’s the luggage, or reputation, or soul: something reclaimed.  

And there’s the thing we trade:  something rendered.

Something sacrificed.