Mostly underwhelming.

(Full disclosure: I received a free electronic ARC for review through NetGalley. Trigger warning for depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. This review contains vague spoilery stuff.)

"He will always come back for more, Lucy. He won’t give it up until he has to. Dr. Wattenbarger’s words resounded in my head—he had meant them as a warning; I savored them as hope."

Faced with the prospect of seeing her ex Stephen at her best friend Bree's upcoming wedding*, twenty-five-year old Lucy Albright recalls their tumultuous - nay, toxic - relationship. This is a story about two shitty people and their shitty on-again, off-again courtship. Told in alternating perspectives, so we can get the full, skin-crawling experiencing of bouncing around in a sociopath's head. (Said sociopath would be Stephen, and no, you will not find yourself rooting for him, a la Season Five Dexter.)

I'm really not sure what to make of Tell Me Lies; it's readable enough, though I can't exactly call it enjoyable. Lucy is an awful person, and not in relation to Stephen. I've had shitty boyfriends, too, and I know all too well what it's like to know that you're making bad decisions, even as you make them, and commit wholeheartedly anyway. No, Lucy was terrible well before she met Stephen.

That Unforgivable Thing her mom CJ did? The one that's teased to death and not revealed until nearly halfway into the story? It was a betrayal of Lucy's dad and had absolutely zero to do with Lucy herself. Lucy at least acknowledges him as a fellow aggrieved party, but his suffering mostly takes a backseat to hers. It's silly and selfish and hella immature, especially as Lucy falls back on it time and again as the reason her life went so off track. More than once I wanted to backhand her across the face while yelling "Not everything is about you!"

It gets worse as Lucy becomes enmeshed with the (probably?) emotionally abusive (manipulative, certainly) Stephen during college. The low point comes when Lucy skips her fifteen-year-old dog Hickory's final days and euthanasia in order to meet Stephen's family. Not at his suggestion, either; she doesn't so much as mention it to him. Whatever shred of sympathy I felt for Lucy evaporated in that moment.

And then there's Stephen, who was involved in a manslaughter or hit and run or whatever you want to call it, and is never punished for his role in a girl's death, even as it kinda-sorta-but-not-really comes to light. Okay, so he wasn't accepted to his first round of law school picks, boo hoo. How about some jail time to go with that bruised sense of white male entitlement?

While this is all too believable, it's also deeply unsatisfying; sometimes it seems like fiction is the only universe in which men are held to account for their violence and misogyny. That Stephen is not feels like a bit of a betrayal in itself.

Basically I just couldn't with anyone or anything.

* Though it's wholly unclear why Stephen is even invited, let alone allowed to bring a plus one. He and Evan weren't particularly close in college, and certainly not tight enough that Bree would feel forced to make her bestie revisit that part of her past.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2018/06/12/tell-me-lies-by-carola-lovering/ ( )