Series?: N/A
Pages: 384 pages
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Dates read: January 31st - February 2nd, 2015 (ebook)
Goodreads synopsis:Review: 4.7/5 Stars
The first time Lou meets mysterious Christian, she knows he is The One. But Christian is hiding a terrible secret. Why does he clam up every time Lou asks about his past? Why doesn’t he have any family photos, and why does he dye his blond hair black? When Christian’s house goes up in flames, his tires are slashed, and he flees for his life, Lou insists on going with him. But as Christian’s secret is unveiled in front of the whole world, it seems everything he’s ever told Lou is a lie. Can what the media are saying about him really be true? Should Lou trust him? Or is she in grave danger? And what if their accidental meeting wasn’t an accident at all...?
Was this book ever a wild ride! Mystery isn't a big like for me, but I thought I'd take a chance with this one because the e-reader preview intrigued me so much. And let me tell you how glad I was to do it. Little White Lies is so full of twists and turns that I was constantly on the edge of my seat, waiting to see what was going to happen next.
I can't write much of a detailed review about this lest I give anything away, but I'll talk you through the basics. Lou meets Christian when she's in university and she's determined to be with him. But this story isn't only about that. Strange things start happening around Christian. Someone frames him for a break-in at his job, he doesn't want to go out with Lou in the evening and it seems that someone is out to get him. This leads us to the first twist.
Katie Dale's writing in Little White Lies is extraordinary. It's subtle. There's never any info-dumping, even if this story in a lesser writer's hands could've been a disaster in that field. The reader's find things out at the same time as the character does, or only when we need to to understand the story. Nothing is revealed too soon or too late and nothing gets confusing, even after the story takes about twenty twists and turns into territory you didn't think it would. Sometimes with stories like this, it's hard to keep track of everything that's going on but here it isn't. The action is easy to follow despite its complexity.
The only thing I would complain about is the fact that there were so! many! exclamation! marks! They were definitely overused in the dialogue and in Lou's narration, it got distracting quite early on in the book. Also, this novel is set in England, so the terms and dialogues are written with English terms that a North American like me doesn't necessarily use on a day-to-day basis. It took some time to get used to, but in the end it was fun and refreshing to read a book that wasn't set in a typical American setting and narrative.
The characters were pretty great too. Lou seemed like kind of a ditz at times though (for example, every time someone asked her a question, she always thought "What? They know my secret? How?" Every. Single. Time. It got slightly annoying towards the end but it's a fact that's easy to look over). Also she flip-flopped between opinions of "Christian's innocent! No he's guilty!" way too quickly in my opinion. She automatically believed whoever gave her an inch of convincing evidence. I wanted to yell at her a few times in the book.
I loved the parallels that Katie Dale made between Christian and Lou's lives, their lies and double-identities. I also very much enjoyed the way Katie Dale wrote Christian. You wanted to believe he was the good guy, just like Lou did, but because of the way he was written, there was still a seedling of doubt. This I loved because it made the ending hard to predict (and I really, really didn't predict it).
Kenny and Vix were also interesting characters. I do kind of wish that there would have been more of a resolution to Kenny's story. He was there and then he wasn't and we don't really get to see him get a satisfying ending, though maybe he didn't really deserve one...
Little White Lies is an interesting novel about the impact that lies can have in our lives and how people aren't always who we initially perceive them to be. It's amazingly written with sharp twists and turns that leave you waiting to see what happens next but doesn't leave you confused. I would definitely recommend this to lovers of mystery/whodunnit novels. And even if you don't, I still recommend you check it out because you might just fall in love with it too.
No comments:
Post a Comment