What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell

Title: What I Saw and how I Lied
Author: Judy Blundell
ISBN: 0439903483
Publisher: Scholastic
Published: 2010
Author's Website: http://www.judyblundell.com

Rating: 2/5

The jacket on this is representational of the story - a scared looking girl (Evie) trying to make the jump into adulthood.  This book really got under my skin, like no other book has before.  For me it was a love-hate relationship as a reader.  I wanted to like the story, but found it conflicts with so much of me that although I was compelled to read it from cover to cover, I didn't enjoy large chunks of it.  It's really well written, and there is a hard hitting plot in the story...I found it very predictable, almost like a black and white movie, where you know the outcome long before it gets too far.

What I Saw and How I Lied, does contain some very hard to face truths, it covers racism in association with the war, opportunist themes, blind love and some gritty truths about human interaction, as well as betrayal.  A lot of it just didn't sit right with me, the characters however, played their part well especially Evie who manages to be innocent with compete naivety and abandonment, whilst trying to mimmick her mother whom she loves so much. I did enjoy the ending, which heralded what I perceive to be Evie's true coming of age and acceptance into adulthood. I feel this may be a very good candidate for a book group to use, as it holds a lot of discussion material within its pages.

The one comment that I take away with me out of this book is...."you could make apple pie out of Ritz crackers"...hmmm, sounds good to me :)

Synopsis from the cover:
"Some things are never meant to be revealed."