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A review by secre
Lie Still by Julia Heaberlin
3.0
All in all, I struggled with Lie Still. The plot line was too far fetched, there were way too many strings that made it difficult to follow and many of the characters were caricatures rather than realistically three dimensional characters.
There were at least three mysteries hammered together here, all of them vying for importance. The author would have been better to have one focal point with perhaps a single sub-mystery rather than muddying the waters so thoroughly.
Characters wise, the novel makes it difficult to empathise with any of them. Secrets are a huge aspect of the novel and how much different people are hiding, but so much time is spent mithering over secrets that it slows the book down and makes characters unrelatable. Additionally, many of the characters - particularly the Texan wives - could have stepped straight of Desperate Housewives.
The topic matter is dark and covers rape, abuse and the scars that are still being dealt with many years later. That is a huge part of the protagonists make up and it does make for a heavy read as well as a slow and over saturated one, even if the writing style itself reads quite well.
There were at least three mysteries hammered together here, all of them vying for importance. The author would have been better to have one focal point with perhaps a single sub-mystery rather than muddying the waters so thoroughly.
Characters wise, the novel makes it difficult to empathise with any of them. Secrets are a huge aspect of the novel and how much different people are hiding, but so much time is spent mithering over secrets that it slows the book down and makes characters unrelatable. Additionally, many of the characters - particularly the Texan wives - could have stepped straight of Desperate Housewives.
The topic matter is dark and covers rape, abuse and the scars that are still being dealt with many years later. That is a huge part of the protagonists make up and it does make for a heavy read as well as a slow and over saturated one, even if the writing style itself reads quite well.