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A review by dustygold
An Honest Lie by Tarryn Fisher
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 preferredfor 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.
• 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.
• 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
All in all it was technically a suspenseful read but it felt kind of… cobbled together, and fell flat at the end.