Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeney

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.

I thought these opening lines were brilliant. What a great set-up to a story! Unfortunately, the rest of the book was much less brilliant. It tells the story of Amber Reynolds, and the chapters alternate between what she hears and thinks as she lies in a coma, the events of the week leading up to her being in a coma, and the diary entries of a young girl from the 1990s. 

I wanted to love this – I had been looking forward to reading a well-written, tautly paced thriller. Unfortunately, I found this neither well-written not taut. Sometimes I Lie has tons of 5-star ratings on Goodreads, so I am obviously in the minority, but this book irritated me more than any book I’ve read in a long time. The plot was so convoluted and the degree to which I would have to suspend reality to enjoy the book was utterly ridiculous. Here are the things that bothered me the most:

1. The unreliable narrator. I really don’t mind an unreliable narrator when it is done well, but this felt more like a trick being played on the reader than a truly unreliable narrator. Feeney changed the character’s name in the end, which pissed me off because HOW is the reader expected to figure out the mystery (and trying to figure out the mystery is the joy of a good thriller) if the author doesn’t even give us the character’s real name?
2. NONE of the characters were even remotely likeable.
3. Everyone in the book seemed to have a (fairly easily) diagnosable mental illness.
4. Stupid things were described in ridiculous detail.
5. The huge “twist” everyone is talking about was more of a twist, followed by an untwist, and then a retwist. It got ridiculous and completely unbelievable.
6. There is a gratuitously detailed (in my opinion) rape scene that is then just forgotten like it never happened.
7. There is a dude who has a tanning bed in his dank and dingy apartment for the sole purpose of meeting his demise in said tanning bed.
8. The ex-boyfriend is a caricature who ends up being too easily forgotten in the end. As a matter of fact, all of the supporting players are caricatures.
9. Storylines are abandoned – what ever happened to Amber thinking her husband was cheating on her with her sister??
10. In the opening lines, April says she lies, but when I finished the book I could not think of a single instance in which she lied. She hid things from people, maybe – well, just her husband – but she never really lied about anything. And that’s the NAME OF THE FREAKING BOOK!
11. Also, Amber says her husband doesn’t love her anymore in the opening paragraph. I never got that sense and did not understand why Amber felt that way.
12. An 11-year-old girl “lends” another 11-year-old girl her imaginary playmate, who the girl STILL HAS as an adult. And she talks to other adults about the imaginary playmate as if she is a real person.
13. The writing was simplistic. The grammar was questionable at times. Perhaps this has more to do with the genre (I gravitate more towards literary fiction than genre fiction), but it bothered me nonetheless.
14. Amber keeps hallucinating about a girl in a pink nightgown. I think the girl was meant to be her. But I am not entirely sure. Even after finishing the book. And that annoys me.
15. I had to Google the ending because I had NO IDEA what it meant. And all I found on the internet were a bunch of other people who had NO IDEA what the ending meant.

The book did compel me to finish it – if nothing else, to get to this amazing plot twist everyone was raving about. It the end, however, the “twist” just seemed silly and the book missed on all marks for me.