This Lie Will Kill You, by Chelsea Pitcher
I often feel that young adult fiction is dismissed as, well, young adult fiction. But I believe that even literature that is not on the literary canon has value, and I do quite enjoy these young adult high-school murder books, of which there are so many. I find that they are usually very well-written, with pacy plots, shocking twists and often quite poignant themes and messages. I also read an article once about how young adult fiction is in its very nature dramatic and emotional, because its teenage narrators inherently view the world in an emotionally sensitive and volatile way. This one seemed to have all the ingredients to be a really enjoyable YA read, but unfortunately it didn't quite do it for me.
'This Lie Will Kill You' is about a group of five American teenagers. They are invited to a house party at which they are forced to come clean about a tragic death they were all linked to a year before. One of the first things that struck me about this book, which when I first noticed it was bizarrely funny, was that the cast of characters was almost identical to the cast in other YA books I had read previously. It's almost like YA authors have a list of stock characters that they select from before they start writing. Perhaps Pitcher had them all folded up on slips of paper in a box, and then simply pulled out five. Ah, the straight-A student, the popular girl, the jealous boyfriend... This probably wasn't the case, but it did seem amusing that the people in this book were so remarkably clichéd. That said, there is no harm in stock characters. Commedia dell'arte was a vastly successful form of theatre that depended entirely on stock characters, and pantomimes to this day have identical casts. I've even heard it said that Shakespeare's plays make use of characters that fulfil roles (the tragic hero, the antagonist, the love interest), and it is often evident from their dialogue that they are actually aware that they are fulfilling these roles.
Anyway, I have digressed a little. One of the other features of this book that is very typical of the genre is its narrative structure: the perspective changed in each chapter, alternating between the five protagonists. This technique can be very effective when the plot involves lots of lying and betrayal, which this one did - the same situation can be told from different characters' points of view, and it makes for a good way of exposing the truth bit by bit. However, it wasn't particularly well executed. The chapters were not labelled according to which character was telling them, and since all five characters were in one place all together for the majority of the book, it was not always clear which of the five was narrating.
The other thing that didn't quite work for me was the inconsistency of the narrative voice.
There were bits of this book that were really well-written, with an omniscient-narrator voice, metaphors and poignant imagery. In the prologue, for example, there is an extended metaphor of a porcelain doll used to describe the narrator:
Porcelain limbs couldn't tremble, and a heart made of plastic couldn't ache this terribly [...] But glass eyes could see everything.
I thought this was quite good, especially as the idea of porcelain was used as a motif throughout, symbolising emotional detachment. But although narration of this style kept cropping up, it wasn't constant.
At other times, the voice sounded as though the teenagers themselves were narrating - we followed their thoughts, and there were expletives used as modifiers. An example is the insertion of the phrase 'nope, that wouldn't do' into the narration, which is vastly different in tone from the lyrical, poetic prologue.
Either of these narrative voices would have been very effective if they had been the only one used. They might also have been very effective if they were each specific to a character, so that, say, the popular girl chapters had a different style from the jealous boyfriend chapters. Alternatively, the differing tones could have been a useful way of differentiating between the narrative past and narrative present, which were frequently switched between. But no, the different narrative voices were instead jumbled together, and in my opinion it wasn't quite as effective as it could have been.
Overall, then, this was a fairly typical YA book. It had all the tropes (I really did cross-reference against a list of YA conventions that came up on my personalised news feed!), and all the potential to be excellent. In truth, though, I have read better YA fiction. It had good plot twists, but I've known better ones. It had a clever narrative structure, but I've seen that style done more effectively. There were some nice moments of lyrical prose and metaphor, but I've read more inventive imagery. It was not a bad book, but it didn't blow me away.