Recent Reads - LIE

LIE, by Caroline Bock

 3.5 of 5 Stars

Buy It:  Amazon  /  Barnes & Noble

Genre:   Young Adult, Contemporary

Pages:  224

Publication:   8/30/2011, St. Martin's Griffin

Why I Chose It:   I was given an Advanced Readers Copy (ARC) in return for an honest review.

Synopsis (from Good Reads):   Everybody knows, nobody’s talking. . . .

Seventeen-year-old Skylar Thompson is being questioned by the police. Her boyfriend, Jimmy, stands accused of brutally assaulting two young El Salvadoran immigrants from a neighboring town, and she’s the prime witness. Skylar is keeping quiet about what she’s seen, but how long can she keep it up? 

But Jimmy was her savior. . . .

When her mother died, he was the only person who made her feel safe, protected from the world. But when she begins to appreciate the enormity of what has happened, especially when Carlos Cortez, one of the victims, steps up to demand justice, she starts to have second thoughts about protecting Jimmy. Jimmy’s accomplice, Sean, is facing his own moral quandary. He’s out on bail and has been offered a plea in exchange for testifying against Jimmy.

The truth must be told. . . .

Sean must decide whether or not to turn on his friend in order to save himself. But most important, both he and Skylar need to figure out why they would follow someone like Jimmy in the first place.


My Review:  Lies can take you a lot of places, but never back.

This is my favorite line in the whole book. It speaks to the part of me that knows that even when the truth is hard, lying--and living with that lie--is harder.

The story is told from multiple, and by multiple I mean like ten, viewpoints which I thought was going to be disconcerting but wasn't. I actually liked getting to see the story from different angles. To get a sense of how a vicious hate crime affects everyone involved. How a community as a whole can be ripped apart.

While I liked Skylar, her relationship with Jimmy is full-on dependence and is borderline abusive. Not physically, but mentally. There's a moment in the story where Skylar convinces herself that everything will be okay once she sees Jimmy. That Jimmy will tell her what to think. I realize this kind of relationship exists in real life, but for me it's still a little hard to swallow.

Other than that I spent a lot of the time hating the remaining characters in this story, except for Skylar's father. He had his flaws, but in the end he tried to redeem himself.

I enjoyed the writing style in this one. It was sharp, concise, tense, but it was a lot of telling. You spend most of the story inside the characters head as they recall the night the beating took place and consider the consequences. If you're looking for action, look elsewhere.

Overall it's worth a read for anyone that enjoys a character-driven, emotional, contemporary novel, but it won't make it to my favorites shelf.

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