Reviews with content warning for Car accident - Liar, Dreamer, Thief

It was initially difficult to tell what genre Liar, Dreamer, Thief fit into - was it literary fiction? Magical realism? A thriller? Some sort of contemporary take on the difficulties of trying to live an average life when your mind is anything but average? Maybe all of the above.

I’ll give you a super brief run down: the MC is a queer Korean-American train-wreck of a human being, who is lightly stalking someone she works with… until she watches him jump off a bridge (while blaming it on her), and has to put aside her rituals and obsessions that keep her safe in order to figure out just what the f*** is going on. Oh, and also attempt to keep her head in the real world, instead of the children’s-book-Korean-fantasy-land that she occasionally lives in. Yup.

I adore books that blur the line between reality and fantasy, and I love that this book did so through the lens of mental illness and an unreliable narrator. Not knowing whether the mystery was real or imagined was something that definitely kept me going.

I also really enjoy reading first person narration when the MC has a psyche like a bowl of noodles. (Maybe it just feels more familiar 😂)

One personal issue - I just think I’ve read a few too many books over the past few years with the formula “average girl sees something bad happen and automatically becomes a questionably amateur detective”, otherwise I might have rated this one higher. I also think the pacing was off in places, and the bad guy was a little one-dimensional.

Honestly though, the MC was so messy and complex that I enjoyed this book anyway - and probably would have enjoyed it even without the mystery aspect.

Content Warnings

stardustdreamer's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Content Warnings

kmsander4's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I have mixed feelings about reviewing Liar, Dreamer, Thief.

On the one hand, I really struggled to get into this book. The first 50 pages or so felt like a real slog. Katrina kept slipping in and out of her "dream world" and I was having to contend with paragraphs explaining geometry to me. I left geometry back in school. I couldn't figure out what it was doing in a book that was described as a page-turning thriller.

Then, all of a sudden, it turned. The twists started to appear. Characters started to become shadier and shadier, fewer things were adding up, clues kept leading Katrina all over the place. Now, the pages were really turning. I wanted to see where this was going. I began to understand Katrina's dream world. I even realized the purpose of the geometry talk as it guided me through the evolving storyline that quickly become more twisted and convulted.

The ending? Well, I saw some of it coming but certainly not all of it. Clues that I thought were being dropped for me to connect, turned out to be big fat red herrings. And who doesn't love a good red herring?

So, in short, yes, the first chunk feels a bit tedious but once you push through it, the thriller really shines!

Content Warnings

More...