None of This Is True

My August Book of the Month selection was None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell (the other options were Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo, The Many Lives of Mama Love by Lara Love Hardin, Happiness Falls by Angie Kim, Shark Heart by Emily Habeck, and Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Canas). I am a big fan of Jewell so I was already anticipating her latest release and it did not disappoint! Josie Fair is celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at a popular pub with her husband Walter, a rare outing for the two of them, when she notices that another woman is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday with her husband and a large group of friends. Josie is captivated, maybe even obsessed, by her so-called "birthday twin" and learns that she is Alix Summers and that she has a popular podcast about women who have overcome tremendous odds to create new lives for themselves. She contrives to meet Alix again and convinces her that she would be a good subject for her podcast because she says that she is on the verge of making big changes in her life. At first Alix is wary but she is soon drawn in to the story of Josie's complicated life with her much older husband and her troubled daughters. As Josie insinuates herself into her life, Alix begins to suspect that she is hiding some incredibly dark secrets about her family and that her own family might be in danger. The narrative alternates between the POVs of Alix and Josie and also includes transcripts of the interviews conducted with other characters for Alix's podcast and scenes from a Netflix documentary filmed after the events described (which is extremely effective at creating suspense because it implies that something terrible has happened and I wanted to keep reading to find out what it was). What I loved most about this novel is that Josie is an incredibly unreliable narrator and I kept changing my mind about her as snippets of her past are revealed little by little. As with most of Jewell's other psychological thrillers, there are lots of twists and turns, including a final one that absolutely blew my mind and made me rethink everything I thought I knew about Josie. I still haven't made up my mind about her and I love it when a book does that to me. I also really enjoyed the character of Alix, especially in juxtaposition with Josie, because, even though it appears that she has a perfect life that Josie envies, there are also secrets about her family hiding under the surface. As I previously mentioned I could not put this book down because there is an atmosphere of foreboding on every page and I had to know what happened. Fans of the author are sure to love this but I recommend it to everyone who loves a good domestic thriller!