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A review by mizuhanome
This is Why We Lied by Karin Slaughter
4.0
I'm writing this immediately after finishing. So maybe it's going to be a bit biased because I still feel completely devastated by that ending
This is Why We Lied is a Good Book. It's a Solid Book. It's truly a 4 star book ...for me, personally. It seems like a lot of people really love this book, and I think a part of that is also part of why it didn't fully click for me, which is the fact that this is book 12 in a series. Book 12?!?!?!?
The beginning of this book is really... I'm not sure if "slow" is the right term so much as, it goes over a lot of details that I struggle to care about. The thing is like... I'm sure this book, seeing the main leads go on their honeymoon, is very very satisfying for people who have read the whole series and watched them develop. It just... focuses a lot, too much for my tastes, on "isn't it so nice that these characters you may not know anything about are in love". It's very very very overly sappy and fanservicey before we get into the meat of things. That's pretty minor, though, but it drags at the start... Another thing is that this books writing style really didn't stand out to me one bit, which disappointed me and probably made it a bit hard to feel motivated to read it, but that's solidly personal preference.
It's good, though. I'm a sucker for closed area murder mysteries, I'm a sucker for family drama, all the good things in the synopsis that made me pick up the book were very very much there. I liked the characters a lot overall, in spite of the fact I didn't have a preconceived attachment to them. Although I do kind of agree that the culprit is easy to guess early on, it leads you down a lot of different pathways. Not in a "purposefully twisty to get a shock reaction" way, but genuinely unraveling a complex mystery, one completely mundane and grounded but horrifying and interesting.
That's the thing, though... This book is not for the faint of heart. God. Not even a little. It's INSANELY dark, consistently, throughout the entire book. I mean... the whole book centers around the life of a woman who went through almost every type of abuse imaginable, who truly had no one she could trust to not hurt her, no one she could rely on. (That's another thing I like, as well, getting the victim's POV and fully fleshing her out...) And just when you think you've heard the worst of it, it gets even worse. It's not shock value. Most of it is talked about in past tense, and when it is depicted, it only serves to showcase the true severity of the situation, the deep pain that it causes the victim. It felt very true to the reality of extreme familial abuse. It's just really that horrifying. The final reveal made me nauseous, and then start crying, and there's almost nothing that makes me uncomfortable in written text but it was just so harrowing, so real that I couldn't help but feel ruined by it.
So, like... Do I recommend this book? ...I recommend a good read-through of the content warnings first. And then, yeah.
This is Why We Lied is a Good Book. It's a Solid Book. It's truly a 4 star book ...for me, personally. It seems like a lot of people really love this book, and I think a part of that is also part of why it didn't fully click for me, which is the fact that this is book 12 in a series. Book 12?!?!?!?
The beginning of this book is really... I'm not sure if "slow" is the right term so much as, it goes over a lot of details that I struggle to care about. The thing is like... I'm sure this book, seeing the main leads go on their honeymoon, is very very satisfying for people who have read the whole series and watched them develop. It just... focuses a lot, too much for my tastes, on "isn't it so nice that these characters you may not know anything about are in love". It's very very very overly sappy and fanservicey before we get into the meat of things. That's pretty minor, though, but it drags at the start... Another thing is that this books writing style really didn't stand out to me one bit, which disappointed me and probably made it a bit hard to feel motivated to read it, but that's solidly personal preference.
It's good, though. I'm a sucker for closed area murder mysteries, I'm a sucker for family drama, all the good things in the synopsis that made me pick up the book were very very much there. I liked the characters a lot overall, in spite of the fact I didn't have a preconceived attachment to them. Although I do kind of agree that the culprit is easy to guess early on, it leads you down a lot of different pathways. Not in a "purposefully twisty to get a shock reaction" way, but genuinely unraveling a complex mystery, one completely mundane and grounded but horrifying and interesting.
That's the thing, though... This book is not for the faint of heart. God. Not even a little. It's INSANELY dark, consistently, throughout the entire book. I mean... the whole book centers around the life of a woman who went through almost every type of abuse imaginable, who truly had no one she could trust to not hurt her, no one she could rely on. (That's another thing I like, as well, getting the victim's POV and fully fleshing her out...) And just when you think you've heard the worst of it, it gets even worse. It's not shock value. Most of it is talked about in past tense, and when it is depicted, it only serves to showcase the true severity of the situation, the deep pain that it causes the victim. It felt very true to the reality of extreme familial abuse. It's just really that horrifying. The final reveal made me nauseous, and then start crying, and there's almost nothing that makes me uncomfortable in written text but it was just so harrowing, so real that I couldn't help but feel ruined by it.
So, like... Do I recommend this book? ...I recommend a good read-through of the content warnings first. And then, yeah.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Incest, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, and Violence
Moderate: Addiction, Alcoholism, Drug use, Rape, and Car accident