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popsiclesinbed

popsiclesinbed

Liar - Justine Larbalestier This is a book that I didn't really like, but recognize that it is interesting and has a lot of potential for book club discussions. The only thing for sure that we know about Micah is that she is a compulsive liar. She likely also lives in New York, has a white French mother and black American father, and is a teenager.
The unreliable narrator thing is interesting, but I think Larbalestier took it too far; so far, in fact that there is basically nothing in the novel you can pick out as "true." I know the story is supposed to be about lying, and possibly about psychosis, and about not knowing what is true and what is false, but by the end I couldn't help wondering if Micah is just a teenager who thinks she's clever writing a story for school that doesn't make any sense. Novels aren't supposed to point so obviously at the writer, are they?
The one thing I thought could be really meaningful was the issue of gender identity that ran through the novel - from Micah telling everyone at school at first that she's a boy, to the details of transformation that are very female-specific, to her reiteration that she is "half girl, half boy," to her teacher at the end telling her, "it's okay to be a girl." Could this book be a gender narrative a la Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper?"
But then I read on Larbalestier's website that she has been "shocked by that reductive reading of Liar." Oh well, I still think it's the most interesting way to read the novel.