Title: Lie
Author: Caroline Block
Release Date: August 2011
Published By: St. Martin's Griffin
Pages: 224
Goodreads Rating: 3.53 stars
Review: Skylar's boyfriend Jimmy is facing charges of assault on two El Salvadoran immigrants, and she's the only witness and she's not talking. How can she, when Jimmy was her savior after her mother died? As the pressure mounts, she knows stepping forward is the right thing to do, but before she can do that, she must first figure out why she ever followed him in the first place.
LIE tells a moving story of struggling with conflicts and moral quandaries. Every page is drenched in emotion, and even though it may seem obvious that Skylar should say what she saw, I never got frustrated at her for not doing so because the author made it so you could understand what she was going through and why it was so difficult for her.
What was really interesting about the way this story was told was how effortlessly many viewpoints were woven together. The different perspectives added a lot to the story. For example, it can be easy to see Jimmy as a straight-forwardly bad guy who commits hate crimes, but you also get to see another side of him through Skylar and his friends - you see how he's magnetic, a natural leader, and even though it's obvious that what he did was bad, he's not exactly a villain. There's no excuse for what he did, but there's depth to him and he's believable as a human being.
But although I enjoyed the concept of the plot and the writing was spot-on, there were parts where the story dragged. I'm not always bored by books that feature mainly internal conflict, but here, there wasn't a huge amount going on even introspectively. Everyone struggled with their decisions and conflicts, but it wasn't written in such a way that you got absolutely sucked in to the story.
Still, LIE was a lovely, emotional story with a satisfying ending and very well done multiple viewpoints. The book offers a unique outlook on hate crimes with its perspective, and the characters seem to be just like three-dimensional human beings. The plot does drag here and there, and this is definitely not a book for people who prefer action, but I would recommend this to fans of hard-hitting contemporaries.
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1 comments:
Wow. This book is particularly relevant -- as is Thirteen Reasons Why -- in light of some of the scandals where people have struggled with these very same things. To tell the truth or not. To believe their friends or not. It's easy to judge the 9 o'clock news, but harder when we're in those same shoes. Thanks for putting the spotlight on this book! We may have to check it out.
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