Publication Date: September 10, 2024
One night. Two sides of a story. In multi-perspective storytelling filled with humanity and empathy, Exposure forces readers to reckon with conflicting truths that are not easily reduced to right or wrong.
In 2004, Juliette Marker, a white college freshman, and Noah King, a Black high school senior, are two lonely souls who enter each other’s orbit, forge a connection, and go home together after a night out.
Twelve years later, Noah has done the impossible and made it in Hollywood. His first film is about to be released, and he and his beloved wife Jesse, a successful writer herself, have just had a baby. Meanwhile, Juliette’s best friend Annie is back in LA for the first time in more than a decade, and makes a startling discovery about Juliette that will threaten to blow up the life Noah has struggled to build.
Spanning decades, from LA to Chicago, and told through Annie, Juliette, Noah, and Jesse’s perspectives, this powerful, provocative novel delves into one fateful night and the people affected by it, exploring how race, artistic ambition, and grief expose different versions of the same story.
Exposure is a novel threaded together by grief that will tighten around your heart as your pulse races, prodding an unease of the frightful reach of social media. Author Ava Dellaira brings four characters in and out of each other’s lives from 1999-2016.
The reader will need to be patient but rewarded in the end, as their connectedness is revealed. Noah and Juliette meet coincidentally at an art museum, both dealing with the death of their mothers. But they have met before. Juliette is in college and taught a writing class that Noah attended as a high school senior. But this connection happens because of a need to balm their grieving hearts, which is quickly fueled by lust. It lasts two days, but the embers of this fire will reignite and burn twelve years later.
Annie’s grief for her mother is unique because although death took her mother when Annie was still young, her dad packed her up and left their shared commune when Annie was one year old. Visiting her mother back there seemed only a step in loss before the actual death. So when Annie meets Juliette’s mom, a famous photographer and single mother who treats her daughter as if she is a piece of art, Annie is deeply drawn to both Juliette and her mom.
As time marches on, Jesse finds Noah. Maybe Jesse saves Noah at the same time he saves her. She is watching her dad die of cancer. Yet this young couple turns part of their grief outward using their artistic talents. Jesse writes a book, and Noah writes a screenplay. While Jesse’s words are welcomed, Noah’s are initially shunned, his feelings deemed trivial. Noah is a black man. His hurdles are greater. It is in the character of Noah that genuine anguish is written with such unwavering truth that the reader feels close to walking in his shoes yet cannot possibly.
All four humanly struggle and long for love and acceptance. But as they try to move forward the earth beneath them is like shifting sand. You may not automatically remember American events from 2004-2016, but the author expertly uses what Americans are collectively losing during this time to exacerbate the anxiety of each character. In doing so, it breaks open their differences in race and privilege.
As deeply as the characters are developed, it is the reader who will feel their own conscious being examined. Have we lost the ability to suspend judgment? Can we even ascertain the remote possibility that what we think to be true may be far from it? More importantly, what part do we each play in allowing fairness and truth to guide us? Has social media created a monster lurking in us all, ready to defend ourselves as we devour those around us, thinking our truth is THE truth?
Charged with explosive modern struggles, Exposure will have you examine opposite sides of the same coin in ways you may never have before. This novel will change you.
Ava Dellaira is the author of the critically acclaimed young adult novels In Search of Us and Love Letters to the Dead, which was named Best Book of the Year by Apple, Google, BuzzFeed, the New York Public Library and the Chicago Public Library. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow, and the University of Chicago. She grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and now lives in Altadena, CA with her husband and their two young children.
