Rating: 2/5
Review:
Not for me
Most other reviewers loved The Liar's Room, but I'm afraid I
really didn't. Although Simon Lelic can
write very well, I found this unconvincing and a little formulaic, in spite of
its rather original structure.
A new client arrives in a counsellor's office and quite
quickly it emerges that he is there to torment the counsellor with her past and
with other threats. Both have been
untruthful in many ways – hence the title – and the ensuing dialogue is a battle
of wits between them as some ghastly truths emerge, with the obligatory
present-time peril, of course, and some jumping between voices and timescales.
Perhaps it's just me, but I just couldn’t get involved. The
set-up seemed implausible, the voice of a teenage girl's diary didn't ring true
at all and the inevitable and frequent "She remembered…" episodes just
seemed tediously formulaic. I'm sorry to
be critical, because I thought that Lelic's first novel, Rupture, was powerful
and original. However, that came from a
place of real rage about his subject (bullying) while to me this is just
another manufactured psychological thriller.
As such, it's decently done but it didn't offer me much in the way of
new insight and didn’t really grip me in the way it seems to have done with
other reviewers.
If you're a fan of psychological thrillers you may well
enjoy this far more than I did, but it wasn't for me.
(My thanks to Penguin Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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