Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeney was the first book I read as part of the Fable book club app. On a whim I joined the Book Cub Besties online book club created by devonandwillo on the Fable platform. This pick was essentially crowdsourced and voted on so I did not voluntarily choose Sometimes I Lie; I may have based on the premise, but the execution is what makes this a total dud for me.
Book Review: Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeney
Before we get into anything else, I straight up DNF’d (Did Not Finish) Sometimes I Lie. While I do have a 2024 Goal of reading one book a month and working through my 2024 TRB List, I also do not want to trudge aimlessly through a book I am not enjoying.
For any reader who is unaware, this is the basic premise of Alice Feeney’s debut:
“My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me:
1. I’m in a coma.
2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore.
3. Sometimes I lie.
Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it’s the truth?”
Sometimes I Lie: A Novel, www.amazon.com.
So based on that, you can see what drew me to it. A woman is very limited in her situation and has to figure out what happened to her leading up to this tragic accident. The book is told in a non-linear fashion, going between flashbacks, the present, and past diary entries. But fair warning if that synopsis is interesting to you: be prepared for a book that meanders. And meanders very heavily.
I understand from a writer’s perspective that incorporating action or plot is hard when the main character is in a coma. But because she is in a coma, there are long drawn out scenes that function as hallucinations and the prose goes on and on about how time does not matter in this “in-between” state. Those I skipped through.
As you can gather from the title, this book features an unreliable narrator. Due to the nature of the book, it’s hard to tell what is real or not, and thus it’s hard to have a stake in what is actually happening. I got about halfway through this book (page 177 in my Nook or so) but by then there was not enough payoff to keep me interested in continuing to read. Once I realized I didn’t care enough to keep, like I said, trudging through this quicksand, I skimmed for the next quarter after that halfway point.
Spoiler warning: by then there were some reveals, but it is still very hard to tell what’s actually happening and therefore I cannot be invested. Even if there are bigger reveals at the end of the book — how do we know if that is the truth? I’m honestly too bored to even find out.
It feels a lot like the author came up with this concept and stretched it out for far longer than it actually needed to be. I understand slow burn novels, but this is the slowest of slow burns and it totally lost me. Again, the concept is phenomenal and very interesting, but it takes far too long to execute and there is not enough by the halfway point to keep me engaged or at all caring about what’s going on. There is probably a very interesting story in the last quarter or the book, having just looked at the last page, but I don’t want to muddle through hundreds of pages of things that might not matter just to get to the good parts.
I even bit the bullet and looked up spoilers for Sometimes I Lie and even then it’s still hard to keep track of what is going on. It sounds like there is a good twist, but any really big important plot stuff doesn’t happen until between half and three-quarters of the way through the book. After doing more digging around online it honestly seems like several others are confused by the ending as well; so many it wasn’t worth getting to the ending in the first place.
My Hot Takes (Possible Spoiler Warning)
- This book, for as much as I read it, was filled with horrible people. Are they actually horrible? I don’t know, because it’s an unreliable narrator story. But from my perspective everyone who is a main character is a horrible person.
- If you’re okay with a very slow burn, very drawn out writing, then you may be able to hang on for this one. It sounds like there is something after all those pages, but it’s very difficult to hold on until then. Even when I was skimming through page after page in the last half, there is still more nothingness sandwiched in between the important pieces of plot.
- Is the meandering meant to be suspenseful? Probably. But this execution is the exact opposite of suspense.
- I feel like this book could’ve been about 100 pages shorter and probably would’ve worked better. You’d still get the good premise, and the mystery of what led up to the accident, but there would be way more suspense and drama to keep the reader going.
My Rating: 1/5 Stars
