Friday, July 12, 2019

Summer Reading: Sometimes I Lie

I have a confession. I read every book on my summer reading list within the first three weeks of summer break! I have really enjoyed having uninterrupted time for reading and I have been staying up way too late (it's nice that I don't have to get up at the crack of dawn for school). When I started to write this review for Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeney (which I finished weeks ago), I could not remember a single detail about the plot and I had to find a summary online to remind myself about it. That says all you need to know about this book! Amber is in a medically induced coma after a catastrophic car accident which she cannot remember. Even though she is paralyzed, she can hear voices all around her, including her husband Paul and her sister Claire, as she tries to piece together what happened to her. The narrative alternates between when Amber is in a coma, the events leading up to the accident which suggest that her relationship with her husband is troubled, and diary entries from her childhood which suggest that her relationship with her sister is troubled. Amber is an incredibly unreliable narrator so it is very suspenseful trying to figure out what happened to her.  Feeney also does a very good job of portraying Amber's claustrophobia at being trapped inside her own head. However, I did not enjoy the diary entries because I thought they were quite boring. They involve a huge plot twist that seemed to come out of nowhere and I had a very hard time suspending my disbelief for it. After this revelation and the events that follow, both Amber and Claire become very unsympathetic and I wondered why I bothered to care about either of them. There is an incredibly ambiguous ending which contradicts previous events so it is included merely for shock value. I hate it when authors throw in twists just for the sake of having a twist.  I found this book to be very unsatisfying and, obviously, forgettable.

Note:  Have you read Sometimes I Lie?  What did you think?

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