BOOK REVIEW: There Will Be Lies by Nick Lake

Stephanie O'Connell | 10 January 2015 | Reply

BOOK REVIEW: There Will Be Lies by Nick Lake

Bloomsbury
January 2015
Paperback, $19.99

7/10

Gym Rat doesn’t say, You feel like hooking up? but he does say, You feel like hanging out? so I was close.
I shake my head as I walk past, and I see his mouth say, Bitch, silently.
So yeah, sad face. I really missed out there.

Meet Shelby Jane Cooper.

She’s snarky, loves reading and baseball, and has an overprotective mother who insists on homeschooling her, and never lets her go anywhere alone. Her weeks follow the same routine, never deviating, never surprising her.

And at the end of it, I go to bed and while I’m sleeping the stage hands of my life rebuild the set exactly the same, the layout of my room, the apartment, so that when I wake up everything is the same, repeating seamlessly.

Except… she’s just been hit by a car.

They had to dispose of your bag, Mom says, in a tone that makes me stop stroking my bat like some kind of freak. It had blood on it.
I should be more careful with that stuff, I say. Shouldn’t go spilling it everywhere.

There is a witness to her accident, and he delivers a rather unsettling message.

I stare at the coyote. There’s a crackle about him, almost a halo, like his life is running at a voltage different from other living creatures. Like he’s magic. I could really believe that. Then I believe it even more, because the coyote speaks directly into my head, or that’s what it feels like.
There will be two lies, it says. Then there will be the truth. And that will be the hardest of all.
There’s something weird about the way the coyote says this, like the words are somehow inside my head, echoing, but I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like grasping a slick fog – it squirts out of my hands.

Now Shelby’s life is turned upside down, and she’s trying to work out what the two lies are that the coyote warned about and, come to think of it, if the coyote ever really existed. Shelby doesn’t know what to believe, or where to turn for the truth, but she’s finally going to see the Grand Canyon.

There will be lies is a novel about venturing outside your boundaries, about learning hard truths and dealing with them, and rediscovering yourself when these truths come to light.
It’s about family, love, growing up, and the power of dreams to help you work out your own mind.

Despite Shelby’s penchant for hyperbole, the absence of quotation marks, and a twist that was easy to see from a few chapters in, this is a book that demands to be read. The reader will be pulled in by Shelby’s conversational, humourous tone, and will stay for the intrigue and to see what Shelby will choose to do with new information as it is revealed to her.