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My Sister Rosa

3/5. Seventeen-year-old boy moves to NYC with his entrepreneur parents and his little sister, the budding psychopath. He wants to protect her, or protect everyone else from her – one of those.

I said "yikes, this is a car crash" in the first ten percent of this book, and I don't think it's a spoiler to confirm that yeah, it is. This book shares some DNA with her Liar -- interested in competing narratives and in how we conceive of the origins of evilness in people. Not so much where the evil comes from, but in why we ask that question and what our answers – genes, environment, bad luck – say about us.

So this is interesting, but at a certain point with an author you have to acknowledge that they like writing car crashes, and that you only like reading car crashes under very limited, specific circumstances.

Content notes: Child harm.

Liar by Justine Larbalestier


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is difficult. Hard to talk about without ruining anything, and also hard to really describe as an experience, let alone rate. This is a book about a seventeen-year-old black girl who is dating someone else's boyfriend, until he is brutally murdered. She's also a liar – whether pathological to the point where she believes her own lies or merely compulsive, it remains unclear to the very end.

Yeah, difficult, because there is a lot of really great stuff here. The three movement structure with successive layers of more "truth" is built perfectly. The writing is vivid and complicated, with this lovely scattershot thematic arc of binaries mixed – Micah's race, her sexuality, her gender for a while, truth and lies, and, well, spoiler. This is a book that lies about its genre, and makes it work.

But the very success of the unreliable narrator means that I, for one, didn't get what I usually think I want from a book. You can't ever love a narrator you can't trust, and this book jerks you around from page one. In a good way – creepily and frighteningly and complexly – but there it is all the same. So I admire this book from a craft standpoint, and I keep thinking about it, but yeah. Difficult.

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