Review: Sometimes I Lie

Author: Alice Feeney

Overview from Goodreads:

My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me:
1. I’m in a coma.
2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore.
3. Sometimes I lie.

Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it’s the truth?

Personal Review

I honestly waiver a lot between loving this book and thinking it was just okay. I went into it expecting a lot more then I got out of it, but that could be one me for trusting such high ratings. If I were reading this for the first time again, I think I would’ve avoided any reviews and gone into this blind and I recommend that to any new reader of this book.  If you enjoy the thriller genre or if you want to give it a try, then you can always give this book a try.

The chapters switch between three time lines so you have to keep track of essentially three stories as you change between them. The first is present day when Amber wakes up from her coma. She has no memory of the last twenty-four hours and the accident that landed her in the hospital. Our next is about a week before the accident that give a glimpse into her life. Her marriage is failing, she’s about to lose her job, and she’s sick of playing second fiddle to her sister. The final timeline originally seems the most out of place as it contains diary entries from over twenty years ago.  These are the most confusing to follow as you read through them wondering “what’s the point?” However, the diaries do eventually get tied into the story and everything starts to make sense the further along the book you get.

There are twists a lot the way, but the very last one was predictable to me (Based on other reviews, it seems others that have read it that think otherwise). There are a lot of twists and new reveals almost every chapter that it sometimes seems like too many as you don’t have time to process and figure out one before the next one hits you. I feel that the pages would’ve been better if there were a few less shocks and instead there was a little more development and backstory.

The characters are all over the place as you don’t know who to trust along the way. Your opinion waivers for some of them as you navigate the chapters and you start to question your own thought process. My only negative, similar to the story itself, is that there isn’t a lot of character development so it turns into a lot of the author just telling you x, y, z about them rather than having some sort of backstory that allows the reader to arrive to a conclusion themselves.

This novel lives up to its description of psychological thriller as it does mess with your mind. For me, this way well worth a try to read once, but I’m afraid I’m in the minority (based off other reviews) and this book shall not be re-read in the future. However, I must say that this would make an excellent movie or tv show as the book can be expanded and further develop some of the pieces that I found it was missing.