Author: Caroline Bock
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
ISBN: 0312668325
Pages: 224
Published: August 30th 2011
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
My Rating: 3 hearts- Good but could have been better in, read it though!
Goodreads Summary:
Everybody knows, nobody’s talking. . . .
Seventeen-year-old Skylar Thompson is being questioned by the police. Her boyfriend, Jimmy, stands accused of brutally assaulting two young El Salvadoran immigrants from a neighboring town, and she’s the prime witness. Skylar is keeping quiet about what she’s seen, but how long can she keep it up?
But Jimmy was her savior. . . .
When her mother died, he was the only person who made her feel safe, protected from the world. But when she begins to appreciate the enormity of what has happened, especially when Carlos Cortez, one of the victims, steps up to demand justice, she starts to have second thoughts about protecting Jimmy. Jimmy’s accomplice, Sean, is facing his own moral quandary. He’s out on bail and has been offered a plea in exchange for testifying against Jimmy.
The truth must be told. . . .
Sean must decide whether or not to turn on his friend in order to save himself. But most important, both he and Skylar need to figure out why they would follow someone like Jimmy in the first place.
Racquel's Thoughts:
How do you decide to read a book? What makes you add a book to your 'to-be-read' pile? I'll tell you what: genre, summary and cover. We want to read something we will enjoy, we want something we will end up liking and it's not a secret that everyone judges books by their covers. So to me the answer to those categories have to fall under: YA or adult romance, pretty cover, interesting summary. Lie fit into all these categories so it was a go but let me tell you beneath the pretty cover and hella interesting summary, is a terrible story. STOP, I don't mean terrible it gets 0 stars terrible, I-want-to-burn-this-book terrible but terrible as in this book is not to be read for shit and giggles, it's not a guilty pleasure read you read by the poolside because the story is dark, it's too real and it's heartbreaking. So if your the type to stick to sweet books this is not for you.
I wasn't expecting what I got with Lie, to be honest I don't really know what I was expecting but what I got was definitely 180° not what I was expecting.
First of all if you read any review about Lie (and when I picked up the book I didn't) you will already know the book goes through 10 different POV. Yes, TEN. We got to hear Skylar Thompson's thoughts, she is Jimmy's girlfriend. We read her dad's thoughts, her bestfriends Lisa Marie, from Jimmy's bestfriend Sean wand Carlos, the victim and a bunch of random people but through out all this the one person we don't get to read their thoughts is the one and only Jimmy and if that is a good thing or not I will get back to you on that. I feel like we read about so many different feelings concerning Jimmy that it made up his character and we didn't need to have his POV.
I would like to say that I am the first person to jump on the wagon that knows hate-crime exists, and that yes, there is still racism through out the world. I have seen it and I see it every single day, I live in Houston after all, you can't more of a racial diverse city. So I found everything about beaner hopping, the racism and the ground this book is built on to be absolutely 100% realistic with the fact that last year a group of white kids that call themselves 'crib killers' brought a knife to school ready to 'kill' some 'cribs' (a group of Mexicans who like to think they have a gang) in mind.
I salute Bock for going to the land of taboo and picking a subject from there to write about and if I do say so myself this book is well done. She captured the hate crime perfectly, the writing is very well done and I teared up twice at certain parts of the book. Then why did I give this book only 3 stars? Well there is thing books have and it's characters and the characters of this book frustrated it me from here to Antarctica. While I get that Bock tried her best to portray the characters as realistic as possible and I think she did a good job but I think she was a little extreme about it. One thing I didn't understand is how EVERYONE worshiped Jimmy like he was Jesus Christ himself. I get that maybe Sean and Skylar would kiss the ground he walks on but did everyone have to too? Not one person had common sense to see what he was doing is down right awful? At a certain part of the book, when everyone was praising Jimmy like Buddha I actually liked him even though I knew what he did... his 'charm' got me but it didn't get me enough to overlook what a complete disgusting human being he is, and the grown-ups, oh my god are grown-ups really this naive? because I doubt it. Bock made every single grown up in this book have a mind of a 2 year old! Why did they give a blind eye to the answers right in front of their eyes? I can understand a couple of the grown ups in this book doing it but did it have to be EVERY single one. It frustrated me to no end and made me want to pull my hair out!
I would have liked to read more from Carlos because he was my favorite narrator and less of Lisa Marie who I almost hate more the Jimmy which reminds me to say, I didn't fully understand why Jimmy does the things he does. What caused him to get to the super extreme level of racism he is in? I understand his dad went through a lot because of terrorists and lost his jobs to illegal immigrants but still that doesn't drive a person to torture people. I would have liked more background on that but besides that Bock does a really well job to make you feel for the victims. Not all the characters we read about are saints just like normal people and they all do awful stupid things, but surprisingly that didn't make me hate every one of them. I liked how we saw how each character dealt with what happened in their own way, how they tried to get past it and what their actions and reactions were. I though that was handled very book just like the book and over all I really enjoyed Lie. I even think I can pick this book up again and re-read which definitely in my scale means that this is a must read even though a couple of things could have been better.
Rating:
(thanks to Random Housr Childeren's Books for providing an e-galley ARC for me to review)
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