Would I Lie to You?

This book was interesting at first, because I was very curious to see how this shallow, vapid, spineless woman would get herself out of the mess she made for herself by spending all her husband's savings on frivolous BS. Unfortunately, the story as written does nothing to ultimately woo the reader to her side, so I was left hating her pretty much from beginning to end. Not only does she lie with nearly every breath she takes (I hate liars; I thought her initial lie about the money would be the worst one she tells, but it gets so much worse.), she debases herself again and again in order to keep the truth from her husband. She sells family heirlooms that were meant to be left to her children by their deceased great-grandmother. The author apparently thinks the reader will forgive her for that since she discovers that the pieces weren't real, but the act is both unforgivable and utterly reprehensible. She takes money from her aging parents who live on a tight budget by lying to them about why she needs it, pretending it's for her children's education. Someone who'd lie to their geriatric parents, who both have health issues and minimal savings, and use her own children as the base of the lie, is simply abhorrent. No other word for it! Trying to slog through the book after reading about all her repulsive behavior was a dreary task.

On top of that, she makes herself even more unlikeable by being completely spineless. She's "friends" with a bunch of catty, racist, rich white women who constantly make scathingly offensive remarks about her both to her face and behind her back. NOT. ONCE. does she EVER stand up for herself! Usually when things like this happen in a book, the author allows the protagonist to eventually grow a backbone and defend herself, and there's a cathartic scene wherein she finally tells off the catty antagonists and gives them a big speech about what jerks they are, usually in a deliciously public, embarrassing way. That NEVER happens in this book. Instead she's abused routinely by specific characters, her so-called "friend" keeps enabling the abuse by telling her to just forget about it and by not saying anything herself, and then at the end of the book the worst racist abuser calls her a racial slur in a very public place, and that's the last we see her in the book. She never gets her comeuppance and the main character never shows us that she's finally become the type of woman who will refuse to allow herself to be treated like that. Her sniveling, pathetic desire to be accepted by these people is sickening, and I'd've despised her for that even if she wasn't a pathological liar. She also never stands up to the racist woman's husband who sexually harasses her at work.

Aside from the myriad aforementioned issues with her main character, the author has major issues with her overall story structure. She stretches the suspension of disbelief to its breaking point and makes the husband look increasingly idiotic because of how long he keeps buying all of his wife's increasingly dubious excuses about where the money is. She tries to have a Gossip-Girl style final party where all the characters are present at one event where all the storylines converge and climax, but she fumbles the ball badly. For one thing, one of those storylines is an entirely shoehorned-in subplot about the enabling friend's husband and some rivalry he has with his brother. We never meet the man or his brother until this final scene, and since the enabling friend was so vile in her acceptance of racist abuse, I honestly didn't give a you-know-what what kinds of problems her family was having. The climactic scene between him and his brother is zero stakes because I didn't care a fig about either character. (We literally. meet them right there at the scene, so I don't know how any reader could be expected to care about either of them.) It's also poorly written and unrealistic. I'd never imagine two grown men talking to each other like that at all, much less at a fancy dress party in front of dozens of people. The scene where the racist woman shouts a slur at the main character is forced and unrealistic as well, even though the woman's been one-dimensionally awful the entire book up to that point. Frankly there are really NO fully developed characters in the entire novel.

The author seems to be headed in a good direction when she has the husband leave his wife once he finally learns the truth, but she blows it by letting everything be wrapped up in the end with zero long-term consequences for the liar-in-chief. A goofy attempt to build tension by making us think one of the three husbands has committed suicide (either the main character's husband, the enabling wife's husband or the racist woman's husband who harasses her) fails miserably because, as stated, she fails to make us care about any of these characters enough to give a crap which of them might have jumped. If she had actually killed off the main character's husband that way, I'd've had some grudging respect for her as a writer and her willingness to teach her protagonist a tough lesson on the consequences of lying and stealing. However I didn't once get my hopes up in that direction, because I knew she wouldn't have the guts to actually go through with it. A nice little fairy tale ending was the best we were ever going to get out of her, and sadly the main character she created didn't deserve a happy ending in the slightest. I've never wanted to see a character suffer so much, and been so disappointed.

My one star is because I'm glad there are books like this out there -- commercial fiction with Asian main characters instead of the usual lily-white chick lit. We need more of them, and the more we have, the more there will be across the spectrum from incredible to terrible. The fact that this one falls firmly in the latter category doesn't mean that more books like this shouldn't be published. People of color deserve bad books, too. Fair is fair, and that's the very definition of equality.

4.5 Stars

Faiza's plight in this book was so nerve-racking! After her husband Tom is laid off from his job in banking, Faiza finds herself in a terrible predicament. Their savings account is empty, all of it secretly spent by her to keep up with their affluent friends and neighbors. Instead of confessing her financial infidelity, she tries to find ways to cover up what she's done, but the dilemma she's in just gets deeper.

Though this book is billed as women's contemporary fiction, it had the page-turning suspense of a thriller — fast-paced and great tension throughout. I could NOT put it down!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me a copy of this book. Thoughts are my own.