When a lie gets out of control...
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The blurb
One mistake can have a thousand consequences
Nofar is just an average teenage girl – so average, she’s almost invisible. Serving customers ice cream all summer long, she is desperate for some kind of escape. Then one afternoon, a terrible lie slips from her tongue. And suddenly everyone wants to talk to her: the press, her schoolmates, and the boy upstairs – the only one who knows the truth.
Then Nofar meets Raymonde, an elderly immigrant whose best friend has just died. Raymonde keeps her friend alive the only way she knows how – by inhabiting her stories. But soon, Raymonde’s lies take on a life of their own.
A heart-stopping novel about deception and its consequences, Liar brilliantly explores how far a lie can travel – and how much we are willing to believe.
The Review
I'm pretty sure we've all been there. We've all told a lie at some point, which has somehow gotten out of our control and we wish we could go back and undo that first lie, the one that led on to all those other lies, but then everyone would know. But this is not a white lie, or a little fib that in the grand scheme of things doesn't really matter and will only end up making yourself seem a little foolish. This, on the face of it is heinous, despicable and warrants condemnation. And yet, the author writers this story so convincingly that you find yourself sympathising with Nofar. A man has belittled and humiliated her and then aggressively confronted her. Passers by come to her aid suggest that he was doing something more nefarious...and she goes along with their assumptions.
This was such a great insight into how one small omission in a moment can just spiral completely out of control. The characters are so fantastically written, their complex relationships and motivations so believable. Nofar has all the idiosyncrasies you would expect of a teenage girl in the most tumultuous time in her life. Her relationship with her sister is incredibly complex, but then, that is just what sibling relationships are like. Maya is beautiful and popular, everything Nofar wishes to be. But suddenly the attention is on Nofar and the dynamic of these sisters imperceptibly shifts. I think this relationship was the most complex in the book, and by far my favourite.
So I loved it, I couldn't put it down...and yet.....
It makes me uncomfortable. This is a story of a girl who cries wolf. She lies about an attempted rape. In a world where women are routinely disbelieved and afraid to come forward about the attacks they have suffered, this jarred with me. We don't need any more reasons out there to suggest that anyone coming forward to about sexual abuse, or an attempted attack is lying. It would be all too easy for this book to fall into someone's hands, who would read it and think, 'I bet this happens more than you know'. Argh, the thought that that could happen makes me feel a bit sick.
And therein lies the power of fiction. We don't get to decide what people write about - and when they write it as well as this, it does deserve to be read. Had Nofar lied about something more inconsequential, then the story would have lost its impact. The reason it is SO good, is that she is, in essence, a good person. You war with your emotions over why she has done this to another human - how she can have lied about something so awful. This is exacerbated by the fact that the accused man doesn't really have many redeeming features. It really plays with your moral compass all the way through.
Ultimately people need to see this book for what it is, a story about a girl that tells a terrible lie. And not an indictment that victims of sexual assault are not to be believed.
This was the April selection, as part of the Reading in Heels book and gift subscription boxes. I am not affiliated with them in anyway and the subscription was a Christmas present!
Find out more about Reading in Heels here.