Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

“Everybody Lies” could be an alternative title for this book. I am not for sure there was any character that did not lie about something. And then tell more lies to cover up the earlier lies.

I was attracted to the book as soon as I heard about it. However, the book failed to live up to my expectations. The story follows Nofar, who falsely accuses a man of sexual assault. Once she told that lie, she has to tell more and more lies to avoid the truth being revealed.

Sounds like a great concept for a book. But the book read so slowly. It was like trying to pedal a bike through mud. Almost nothing happened in the book plot wise. The book was almost entirely inner thought and musings by the characters. Even after 200 pages we were no further from the start of the book than we were on page 1. A very slow read.

The book had too many characters as well, over 50 characters. Most of the characters were minor characters who were only mentioned once and never heard from again. There was also a plot line that was totally meaningless in the book. The story of Raymonde, Rivka and Areh’le was totally irrelevant to the story of Lavi and Nofar. Their story was a total waste of time and paper.

Craft wise, there were many instances of POV shifts within the same paragraph. We would be reading about Nofar, then the author would start addressing the scene from another character’s point of view. This “head hopping” was a major distraction.

Unfortunately, the last chapter which tried to wrap up the plot lines was a disaster. We were told in a few sentences how everything turned out. It was too rushed.

With some major revision and improvement, this could have been a 5-star book. But due to the many issues mentioned above, I can only give it two stars. It does deserve two stars as it at least was interesting enough I was never tempted to DNF it.… (más)