Reviewed by Ephantus Gold
“Paper Cut” by Rachel Taff starts quietly, maybe too quietly, like the calm before something breaks. You can feel the weight underneath it —a type of grief that won’t speak but stays there, waiting. The story doesn’t open with action but with a strong sense that someone’s truth is about to break through the surface. The main character, Lucy Golden, is not an easy character to figure out, and that is what intrigued me. She is a memoirist who wrote the popular memoir “Rattlesnake”, a book that not only made her famous but also extremely hated. She is held responsible for killing a person she loved, and whether or not it’s true, the rumor clings to her like a shadow. She’s thirty-five and has lived too many lives already. Her mother, who’s an artist and a photographer, can hardly bear to look at her, and when they talk, it’s not across space or machines – it’s eye to eye, hard and icy, like two people standing on the threshold of something they can’t cross through. Purchase Here.
There’s Isaac Coleman, the documentary filmmaker who once solved the Buckhead Butcher case. He wishes to make his next documentary about Lucy and her life. He talks of bringing her back into the spotlight- more books purchased, more press, a re-release of “Rattlesnake”. He promises fresh evidence which will throw the case wide open. That word, “new,” sounded dangerous to me, like a trick wrapped as a gift. Lucy is intelligent enough not to take anyone in the media at their word, but she nevertheless goes along with Isaac’s request.
The story moves back and forth between her present and her past, through fragments of “Rattlesnake” and memories that feel too sharp to be fiction. We meet her father, Max, a man who built a place in the desert called the Oasis, where people go to “find themselves.” At first, it sounds like a retreat, but soon it feels like something else entirely- something dark and controlling, like a dream that turns into a cage. The book slowly reveals what goes on there: drowned voices, missing bodies, strange “purity” regulations. The more we know, the worse it seems that the truth has been buried under decades of dishonesty.
The prose is calm but cuts deep. Rachel Taff doesn’t decorate her sentences; instead, she pares them down until they sting. There’s a rhythm to her writing, sometimes quiet, sometimes jagged, that matches Lucy’s own state of mind. The dialogue is gritty, sometimes broken, as though people are trying to convey what they really mean but never quite manage to do so. The characters breathe and bruise in real time. Lucy’s voice carries both strength and fragility, and even the side characters, like Isaac and Max, seem to be hiding entire novels behind their eyes. The word choice is simple, but there is tangible weight, depth, and tension between the sentences. You don’t read swiftly through this novel; instead, you feel your way through it. It isn’t flash writing; it’s real, and it hurts in the best possible way. Themes of manipulation, courage, and the strange ways that individuals survive the atrocities that would have killed them are meticulously built, and every chapter has you questioning what is real, who is lying, and whether redemption can occur after so much damage.
When I’d read “Paper Cut“, I felt undone and restless, as though I could still hear voices echoing in the desert. I adored how Rachel Taff writes with a quiet flame; she doesn’t push emotion but instead lets it simmer until it stings. This book is for readers who enjoy their stories complex, emotional, and uncomfortably human, as well as those who are not afraid to walk through the darker areas of memory to arrive at the truth. It’s not a story that ends cleanly, and maybe that’s what makes it so haunting.
