Friday 1 July 2016

There Will Be Lies

24232997

Book Title: There Will Be Lies
Author: Nick Lake
Date Started: June 27th 2016
Date Completed: June 29th 2016
Genres: Thriller, Adventure, Contemporary, Fantasy
Quality Rating: Three Stars
Enjoyment Rating: Two Star
Final Rating: Two stars
Review:

◆ Thank you NetGalley for this eBook copy for review ◆

I don't know what this book was - did it even know what it was? It couldn't make up it's mind on plot line, genre, characters or even writing style. I feel like maybe a few years ago I might have found it entertaining enough to pass the time, but right now it was just disappointing for a book that's been nominated for the Carnegie Medal.

Writing that tries to use slang and copy a certain dialect - especially when that style is 'teenage talk' - has always irritated me. I have yet to find anyone who can pull it off without being stiff and patronising, and I found especially in There Will Be Lies that its inclusion made me genuinely dislike some of the characters because it felt so forced and unnatural. I think this was made worse by the contrast of the Apache folklore: I'm all up for modern twists on traditional tales, but I found that the folklore was almost entirely eclipsed by the frankly dull narration of the protagonist. As someone not very familiar with Apache culture and stories I would've really loved to learn about it through the book, but it was in way no used to its full potential and I don't feel like I got to see the culture as much as I would have liked.

There Will Be Lies started one plot line and then and veered down a different road, and then again changed directions halfway through to the point where I don't actually know what the main story was - all I can see are events that turned into side stories that got dropped. Thrillers are about twists ad turns, fair enough, but too much was being shoved in without any development to take over story that it was hard to know what was really happening and what to even take as a threat because for all you knew it would be gone in twenty pages.
Moreover, we get almost two sides side-by-side anyway: Shelby's real life runaway road-trip and her mysterious 'Dreaming' world following Apache folklore. Again, I'm fine with this sort of thing in theory - parallel stories that give you hints about what's happening is actually really interesting for me - but I didn't feel like these two stories matched up. I'm still trying to work out if Shelby's 'Dreaming' was pure fantasy or magical realism, but aside from that I don't understand how it was relevant in the end to the contemporary side of the book. If it was supposed to illustrate her inner feelings it didn't do a very good job, and if something was supposed to happen in her fantasy world to help her real life then all threat was gone if her problems could be solved by some overpowered magic at the last hurdle.

None of the characters in this book really connected with me. Whether it was the style of writing, the one-dimensional personalities of the people (I don't care if they tell lies, it doesn't make them developed characters), or their position in the narrative, I had a hard time rooting for any of them - and having said that a lot of them flick in and out of even being included in the story so there weren't huge periods of time hen I could even get to know them.
Shelby was a really dislikable protagonist. Within the first chapter I was just shaking my head at how judgmental and unpleasant she came off; maybe it was to try and get the teenage feel across, but she was just downright mean at points. And then, when things started to get more serious, instead of growing from her initial flaws, she just fell flat with almost no personality at all. I think a big reason I didn't like this book was because Shelby - the one character who sticks around for the whole thing - was so hard fir me to connect with.

Lake's book was very back-and-forth, stopping-and-starting throughout the whole thing. Thriller's are supposed to be hard to put down and fast-paced, but there was barely enough of a solid story in the first place to hold the tension together. While I appreciate the fantasy element running through the story and its attempt to create some diversity of plot, what actually happened was the time in the real world and Shelby's 'Dreaming' felt so disconnected that we were switched between two different stories, and not building towards one big climax like a thriller should.

I admit I didn't know very much about There Will Be Lies going into it, but I still has reasonable expectations considering it's advertised as being nominated for awards and by an award-winning author. But having finished it I feel like it was nominated for featuring some unconventional issues in abstract ways but ultimately overlooks the fact that they're not actually explored that much. What I can understand seems like a brilliant inclusion of diversity came off like tokenism to me, and with little substance underneath (to the point where I couldn't work out where to even mention it in this review because it didn't add anything to the story).

Image Source - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24232997-there-will-be-lies

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