Author: Justine Larbalestier
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Rating: WARTY!
This audio CD is read by Channie Waites and it's done abominably.
I'm a fan of Larbalestier, having favorably reviewed How To Ditch Your Fairy here, and the Magic or Madness trilogy starting here, but this novel I immediately had antagonism towards. The opening few paragraphs were awful enough by themselves, but the reader was truly, truly lousy which made the words screech at me like nails on a chalk-board. I almost ditched it after skimming the first three tracks. I decided to continue once it reached chapter two, but I knew I could give up on it at any minute it was so bad. The main character, Micah (who isn't remotely represented by the cover image, as usual BTW!) is a liar. The original of her lying is so poor that it seemed to me that it had to be a joke. Now she's in high-school, and her best friend Zachary has died, so we’re dealing with the aftermath.
The problem with reading a novel titled Liar, especially when it’s written in first-person PoV, is that you can't believe a word of it. This is a really interesting premise, because what is fiction if not outright lies?! See the problem here? If all fiction is pure lies by definition, then why baulk at a novel that comes right out and announces, right up-front, that it’s lies?
That's a tough question to answer, because it seems like a lot more simple of a question than it really is. The problem I had with Larbalestier's novel went way beyond that it was lies, though. It's one thing to tell lies, but then you need to give your reader an in: a way for them to have a hope of determining what's a lie and what isn’t, or at the very least, to tell the truth at the end, but when you keep pulling the rug from under your reader, you're doing nothing but screwing them over, and teaching them not to waste their time with anything you write. Fortunately for Larbalestier, she has an in with me because I've read and liked other novels of hers. Unfortunately, she could not save this one.
The main character - indeed, arguably the only character - in this novel is a pathological liar. She admits it. She's addicted to lying. Or is she lying about that? This is how you know it’s a lie when she offers to tell you the honest truth - especially because she betrays every promise she repeatedly makes to do so. She claims utterly bizarre stuff, like that she was born with hair on her body which disappeared after a few days. This actually can happen, and anyone who knows anything about evolution knows that this kind of thing is, in general, inevitable. Doubtlessly this evolutionary left-over has played into werewolf legends, but in this novel, we can’t believe that she really was born with hair any more than we should believe that she's really a werewolf, as primitive people might have stupidly done.
Neither can we trust that her best friend, and perhaps boyfriend, Zach was murdered in the park. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. This, in turn, means that we can’t believe that the school is grieving over him, or that Micah had any kind of relationship, much less a three-some, with Zach's best friend Tayshawn, or his daytime girlfriend Sarah. We can’t even believe that Micah even knew Zach, let along hung out with him, let alone dated him in the evenings. Who even has a daytime girlfriend and an evening girlfriend anyway? Did the daytime girl never wonder why she could never see her boyfriend in the evenings? Was he even murdered? See what I mean? In order to have a liar tell the story, you have to have a base of truth somewhere, and this mess of a novel gives none. It's like putting a terrestrial animal into a tank full of water with no place for it to set foot. Eventually, your story is drowned by the endless lies.
In short, this entire novel is purest bullshit from the very first word, so what, I ask, is the point of reading it? Almost needless to say: I didn’t finish this. If the narration had not been so utterly nauseating, I might have tried to press on, but even if the narration had been angelically poetic, I still would have had trouble listening to a self-obsessed congenital liar ramble on for hours about nothing. WARTY!
