Touched

Robbie Young is an ordinary twelve-year-old boy about to drop a bombshell that will devastate his small town family. One day he rides his bike home after school, finds his mother in the kitchen making dinner, and speaks aloud the secret he's been keeping for a year, "Jerry Houseman's been touching me." Robbie has been molested and the Young family will never be the same. From that moment on, the novel unfolds with inexorable power. The story is narrated in four parts: first by Robbie's mother, then by Jerry Houseman himself, then by Houseman's wife Linda, and concluded by Robbie himself fifteen years later, when he has returned to town for a high school reunion. Each voice is remarkably persuasive and utterly convincing, and the result is a novel that is impossible to put down as it is impossible to forget.

When twelve-year-old Robbie Young comes home and tells his mother "Jerry Houseman's been touching me" the lives of both families fly out of control. Scott Campbell's first novel is a sometime shocking but always the insightful and moving story of a sexual relationship between a young boy and an older man. Told from the points of view of the man, his wife, the boy and his mother, Touched is never sensationalistic or sentimental. Campbell knows how to tell a story, and his innate empathy with all of his characters shines through on every page. Touched might disturb the reader, not because of its subject matter, but because Campbell understands the human heart and its desires all too well.