Tell Me One Thing

  I received a copy of this release from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Title: Tell Me One Thing 

Author: Kerri Schlottman 

Publisher: Regal House Publishing

Release Date: 1.31.23

Publisher’s Summary 

Outside a rural Pennsylvania motel, nine-year-old Lulu smokes a cigarette while sitting on the lap of a trucker. Recent art grad Quinn is passing through town and captures it. The photograph, later titled “Lulu & the Trucker,” launches Quinn’s career, escalating her from a starving artist to a renowned photographer. In a parallel life, Lulu fights to survive a volatile home, growing up too quickly in an environment wrought with drug abuse and her mother’s prostitution. Decades later, when Quinn has a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art and “Lulu & the Trucker” has sold at auction for a record-breaking amount, Lulu is surprised to find the troubling image of her young self in the newspaper. She attends an artist talk for the exhibition with one question in mind for Quinn: Why didn’t you help me all those years ago? Tell Me One Thing is a portrait of two Americas, examining power, privilege, and the sacrifices one is willing to make to succeed. Traveling through the 1980s to present day, it delves into New York City’s free-for-all grittiness while exposing a neglected slice of the struggling rust belt.

My Review

I've already started my Best Books of 2023 list because of this book. 

Clocking in at just 216 pages, Tell Me One Thing circles around a single Polaroid photo taken in 1980 and spans the years between its creation and the photographer's 2019 artist retrospective. Following both the artist's and subject's storylines, readers are given up close examples of "two Americas." Each woman faces many of the same obstacles, but their experiences are wildly different. Quinn watches her loved ones waste away from AIDS and drugs while she struggles to make a career out of her photography. Lulu tries to scrabble together a bare-bones existence, feeling "she’s been running behind all her life, trying to catch up to something." After an arrest, she wonders "why is she the one here, in the cell" causing me to envision Blake Lively's hospital bed scene in The Town. 

In addition to heartwrenching, raw scenes of Quinn and Lulu's hungers, betrayals, and acts of forgiveness, author Kerri Schlottman layers themes of permissions, privacies, and the ownership of art. I will recommend this gut-punch novel all year to anyone who will listen, while impatiently awaiting Schlottman's next work. This reading experience has also reignited my mission to dive deeper into independent press offerings because unfortunately I'm just not finding stories like this coming out of the "big" mainstream publishers. 

Kerri Schlottman is the author of Tell Me One from Regal House Publishing. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Dillydoun Review, Belle Ombre, Women Writers Women’s Books, Muse Apprentice Guild, and The Furnace. Her writing won second place in the Dillydoun International Fiction Prize, was longlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction, and was a 2021 University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize semifinalist.