Review: Liar by Justine Larbalestier

Posted on February 20, 2011 by Phoebe 5156 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F2011%2F02%2F20%2Freview-liar-by-justine-larbalestier%2FReview%3A+Liar+by+Justine+Larbalestier2011-02-20+21%3A59%3A33Phoebehttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F%3Fp%3D515

Liar by Justine Larbalestier
Recommended.

Liar by Justine Larbalestier is, in many ways, a series of confessions—an apology for past wrong-doings, and an attempt to set things right. Just as Micah Wilkinson tells us, over and over through the course of the narrative, that she once was a liar, and just as she struggles (I think) with telling the truth this time around, I feel I must open my review with a confession, and a vow that, this time, things will be different.

My name is Phoebe, and I love spoilers.

I hate the tension and the buildup that comes from not knowing twists—the feeling that the rug’s been pulled out from under you, the way you can’t help but wonder if this new information renders useless what you’ve learned before. Stories that I spoiled for myself include every M. Night Shyamalan movie I’ve ever seen, several TV shows (including recent episodes of Fringe), The Adoration of Jenna Fox, the entirety of the Harry Potter books, and Liar. I view spoiler warnings on internet message boards as invitations to read, not stay away. And as you can imagine, with such a cavalier attitude, I’m quite prone to letting spoilers slip myself.

I knew that, with Liar, the author herself very kindly asked people not to spoil the plot. Of course, I spoiled the plot for myself, anyway. It was still a solid, riveting, gorgeous, complex, and daring book, but I can see, in this case, why it might have been a more interesting experience had I not known the one VERY BIG TWIST, in the same way that Fight Club is a more interesting experience if you go in unspoiled, too (miraculously, for the movie, I did. It was wonderfully disorienting). And so I’m going to try, very, very hard, not to spoil this book.

It’s difficult, though, because the twists are so key here—they impact my perception of the novel’s genre; they impact how you read Micah herself. What you need to know, and I can say safely, I suppose, is that Micah is a teenage girl who cares for a boy. And then that boy goes missing.

And that’s about all I can confidently say.

Except for this: Micah is the best example of an unreliable narrator you’ll ever encounter. There are at least two ways to read this book. One is to believe Micah, a reading which renders the action more fantastic, and renders her more sympathetic. The other is to read her attempts at telling a truthful story as a failure. This is a more realistic story, perhaps, but also a more horrific one—and no one comes out worse in this reading than Micah.

If you choose not to believe her, you’re essentially resigning yourself to believing she’s a villain.

Through a series of possible lies, all told through Micah’s own confounding, frustrating, but strangely accurate voice, Larbalestier creates an incredible story about the truth of adolescence. There are some real gems in here, like this:

“. . . grown-ups don’t remember what it was like when they were teenagers. Not really. They remember something out of a Disney movie and that’s where they want to keep us. They don’t’ like the idea of our hormones, or that we can smell sex on one another. That we walk down halls thick with a million different pheromones. We see each other, catch a glance, the faintest edge of one, that sends a shiver through our bodies all the way to the parts of us our parents wish didn’t exist” (74-75).

Liar raised a lot of questions for me, not just about the narrative itself, but about fiction, particularly fiction for teenagers. In what ways do we deny the complexities of real adolescent life when writing for teens? Are writers liars? Do these lies make us villainous? Do we deny the thorny parts of adolescence that teens themselves know exist? Can we be trusted?

Larbalestier proves here that she, at the very least, can. Liar is not the problem novel you might think it is from the cover. It is, instead, a frank book about identity (sexual, racial, supernatural), sex, storytelling, urban life, freedom, and grief. You don’t always like Micah while reading it, and you won’t find any neat, easy answers here. In fact, I’ll come right out and say that this is not an M. Night Shyamalan movie, and that the pieces will not, at any point, fall neatly into place. Of course not. Life isn’t that easy.

And neither is Liar.

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