Sometimes I Lie Book Review

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the blog! Today, I am back with another book review. This is an author whose books I have talked about and reviewed before. Alice Feeney is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors, and I want to read all of her books.

This book is one of her earlier ones, if not her debut novel. And to be honest, I really enjoyed this book. There were a few things that I didn't like, but overall my attention was grabbed from the very first page.

This book is about Amber who gets into a terrible accident and is then in a coma for pretty much the entire book. She can't move but she can still hear the people around her in the hospital. We slowly find out what happens the week leading up to her accident and obviously after.

That said, I really like when things happen right out of the gate. I thought this book had my attention from the very beginning, I was invested, I love an unreliable narrator. For me the timeline wasn't hard to follow. If you don't like books that jump around between past and present then this is not the book for you. We get a "Now" section, a "Then" section, and diary entries from a young Claire.

The diary section kind of threw me at first. I felt like having three different time jumps is a lot for one book. The diary sections are crucial to the story though, but you don't realize that until the end. And most of them are pretty boring. Like no offense, but the diary of a 12 year old isn't that fascinating. I was chapters into the book when I realized oh, there is more than a couple of diary entries and obviously they are here for a reason.

In line with that, part of the big reveal at the end that has to do with the diary entries and it was really confusing. At least for me. So, I think some elements of this book were taken too far and too much was trying to be done. This is also hard to explain because I don't want to give anything away. But what I mean is, the main character is in a coma, there is a small amount of SA (not explicit), sketchy husband, controlling but also sketchy sister, an affair, time jumping, unreliable narrator and characters. There were a lot of classic thriller tropes and characteristics for the genre that felt like too much for one book.

Don't get me wrong, I read this book in a day, and I love those elements but it's too much. And I was also partly confused at the end.

This may seem very contradicting to my opening when I said Alice Feeney is becoming one of my favorite authors. I don't mean to bash the book because I did love it, but I'm just trying to cover everything I felt while reading.

I'm glad I read the book; I thought the details were very well written, the characters were iconic, the book grabbed and kept my attention. very short read (less than 300 pages), short chapters, etc.

I would still recommend for a one time thriller read and based on her other novels you can tell this is definitely an early one. But I do like her more recent books a lot better, and would definitely recommend starting there first.

Overall, I would give this book a 3.5/5 stars.

Alright folks, that is all I have for today! Come back next week for another blog post! As always, thank you for reading :)