Reviews

An Honest Lie by Tarryn Fisher

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emilyacv's review against another edition

medium-paced

2.5

This was a weird one. Tell me why the main character is involved in a cult and that is not mentioned at all in the description? It doesn’t have the guesswork that I like in thrillers. Just okay, I would say forgettable but it’s so wacky I probably will remember it.

becsa's review against another edition

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challenging dark hopeful mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

geauxgetlit's review against another edition

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4.0

I enjoy Tarryn Fisher’s fast paced thrillers and An Honest Lie, was another great read for me by her.

I am so fascinated by cults and what could possibly lead them there; however, in this book the reason this mother and daughter showed up was unlike many others. I wasn’t sure what type of cult it was, because it was very similar sounding to many polygamists compounds.
Summer as a child growing up thought her mom was a fool for disrespecting the leader and the man who saved them. However, she soon realizes that may have been a mistake.

Told in two different timelines from Summer’s childhood to now as a renewed version of herself taking a girls trips with her boyfriends friends wives.

vacantbones's review against another edition

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4.0

I am, admittedly, getting cult fatigue. By that I mean I'm starting to get a bit tired of fictional cult stories that seem to have stormed the fiction market, not of cults themselves. Naturally.

An Honest Lie, though, went down smoothly, reminding me at times of another of my 2022 reads, Sex Cult Nun. It just hit the right notes for me as summer slowly creeps away to let fall take its place: murder, lies, complicated maternal relationships, girls trips with people who definitely hate you. Also, super quick read!

It's interesting to me that some fellow readers consider this one of the worst books of the year (hey, to each their own!) but I really need to know what else they've read to put this near the bottom. It didn't blow my mind, but I liked it enough that, upon finishing the last page, I felt good about the overall experience.

dustygold's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

I’ve enjoyed other books by Tarryn Fisher but this one was honestly an odd read. I liked the audiobook narrator (Lauren Fortgang) and it was entertaining enough to finish, but it wasn’t anything I’d re-read or particularly recommend to others.

• The pacing of the book was odd — there was way more lead up to Braithe’s disappearance than I expected, which felt like a waste of time. There was a LOT of time dedicated to the in-group dynamics only for that group to completely poof off the face of the planet for the latter half of the book.

• Some of the details of the plot don’t make much sense.

Summer needs to disappear from Taured’s radar forever so she takes her mom’s FULL MAIDEN NAME? And then Grant *insisting* that she go on a trip with the woman who keeps repeatedly confessing her love for him in an effort to get him to leave Rainy. Man is as a dumb as a box of rocks. 😅

• Taured is, respectfully, a dumb name. I couldn’t figure out what it was via audio and had to look it up on Google Books just to know how it was spelled. And so then I quickly learned Taured is not a real name at all, but from some weird urban legend man with a passport from Taured, a fictional country? But Taured (in the book) CAN’T be this mysterious man, because he went to school with Rainy’s mom and didn’t just materialize from the ether. I don’t know if this is supposed to be a red herring or what, but the oddness of his name honestly detracts from the book a lot when you hear a made-up word repeatedly, and that word doesn’t even seem to relate to its only other existence in the world.
• (Also, wouldn’t Taured be likely to use some kind of biblical name with a special meaning about power or purity or being a patriarch?)

• I honestly would have preferred

for the villain to be Taured than another compound kid who is somehow working entirely separate from Taured. Ginger felt weirdly shoehorned in, like an editor or mentor read a first draft and said “this needs another twist and I don’t care how ya do it!” Given the information they dropped that Taured had raised a bunch of super nerds who were all really good at “the Internet”, Taured would seem a lot scarier if he had been monitoring her online this whole time and was just lying in wait to strike.

All in all it was technically a suspenseful read but it felt kind of… cobbled together, and fell flat at the end.

lavins's review against another edition

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2.0

2 stars (because i am nice)

This is a long story about a family of a mother and daughter that, instead of finding their way to a better life, they get lost in a cult where they end up being tortured, abused and one of them murdered.

I am failing to understand how the mother thought it was a good idea to go there to begin with, instead of going to live with her parents.

The daughter that at one point escapes, spends her entire life hiding and refusing to show her picture on any online platform, but decides all of the sudden that she's going to be smarter than everyone else and she'll catch the bad guys single handed. Well of course nothing goes as planned.

The ending is ridiculous to say the least.