Sometimes I Lie, by Alice Feeney

sholio read a completely insane domestic thriller (that's the genre of Colleen Hoover's completely insane novel Verity), so I decided to check out a different book by the same author and see if it was equally bonkers.

For the first half, it was disappointingly tame. And then the WTF began!

This is the blurb:

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.

Given that, I went in assuming that everything was a lie and it would be something like Justine Larbalestier's Liar, in which by the end of the book I had no idea whether or not the protagonist was a werewolf, a murderer, pregnant, had some kind of genetic disease, had had sex with someone who was murderered, was in jail, or was in a mental hospital. I was also not sure whether any of the major events in the book actually happened. That was a very frustrating experience.

Sometimes I Lie is not like that. The narrator is wildly unreliable, but by the end of the book you do know what happened in the book.

It had three time tracks. In the present, the narrator, Amber Reynolds is in a coma in a hospital after a car crash. She can hear but not see or communicate. In the weeks leading up to the accident, we get a look at her life. The third track is a childhood diary from age ten.

This book is nuts. The first half is setup for the second half, which is a cascade of increasingly WTF twists. It's nonsensical but I can't say it's not entertaining, though I really could have done without the graphic rape.

A lot of the book consists of something happening, then for the narrator to reveal that it didn't really happen. Almost all of the twists were things that the narrator knew upfront, but didn't tell the reader or lied to the reader about. There's a handwavey suggestion that the narrator lies to herself, but basically it's the author being misleading rather than anything justified by the plot.

I have copied below my emailed liveblogging of the book. Contains spoilers for the entire book, all the way down to the completely insane final page.

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Content notes: Multiple rapes including an explicit on-page rape of a comatose woman. Stalking. Bullying. Abusive parents. Murder. Miscarriage. Fakeout implying that babies burn to death (they're fine actually.) Dead goldfish. (But the dog doesn't die.)