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When Evie's father returned home from World War II, the family fell back into its normal life pretty quickly. But Joe Spooner brought more back with him than just good war stories. When movie-star handsome Peter Coleridge, a young ex-GI who served in Joe's company in postwar Austria, shows up, Evie is suddenly caught in a complicated web of lies that she only slowly recognizes. She finds herself falling for Peter, ignoring the secrets that surround him . . . until a tragedy occurs that shatters her family and breaks her life in two.
As she begins to realize that almost everything she believed to be a truth was really a lie, Evie must get to the heart of the deceptions and choose between her loyalty to her parents and her feelings for the man she loves. Someone will have to be betrayed. The question is . . . who?
Blundell, author of Star Wars novelizations, turns out a taut, noirish mystery/coming-of-age story set in 1947; it's easy to picture it as a film starring Lana Turner, who is mentioned in these pages. When first met, 15-year-old Evie and her best friend are buying chocolate cigarettes to practice smoking. Evie sheds that innocence on a trip to Florida, where her stepfather, Joe, back from the war in Europe, abruptly takes her and her beautiful mother, Beverly, and where Evie falls in love with glamorous Peter, an army buddy whom Joe is none too happy to see. But after a boating accident results in a suspicious death and an inquest, Evie is forced to revisit her romance with Peter and her relationships with Joe and her mother, and to consider that her assumptions about all three may have been wrong from the beginning. Blundell throws Evie's inexperience into high relief with slangy, retro dialogue: Peter calls Evie "pussycat"; Beverly says her first husband "kicked through love like it was dust and he kept on walking." Readers can taste Evie's alienation and her yearning; it's a stylish, addictive brew. Ages 12-up. (Nov.)
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Riki Rikardi
reviewed What I Saw and How I Lied on June 16, 2009
What I Saw and How I Lied
I know, very few of my Goodreads' friends have read or liked What I Saw And How I Lied, but I am so very grateful that such stories are even written and published these days. Historical fiction is not in vogue right now, unless, of course, it involves cattiness and soapy melodrama, it seems.
For one, I loved the atmosphere of this novel. It gave me the same feeling of strange nostalgia for post-WWII America, the way Mad Men does - red lips, cigarettes, glamor and privilege, with a generous pinch of unpleasant - sexism, homophobia and antisemitism.
And then, this is a story about growing up, about that time in your young life when you want to be an adult, to be attractive to men and to be taken seriously. But when you get a taste of this adulthood, it's not as sweet as you expected it to be. You learn that your parents are flawed, that being enticing to men has its cost. You learn to lie and pay dearly for your decisions.
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