I read What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell because it was May’s pick for the Modern Mrs. Darcy online book club. It is not a book I would have ordinarily chosen on my own. It was a slow starting book for me but I did enjoy it in the end.
This was the perfect book to read in between really good books, a palate cleanser of sorts.
What I Saw and How I Lied is a coming of age story set in post-WWII New York and Florida centered around the character of Evie, a teenager desiring to grow up.
Evie’s stepfather, Joe, has just returned from fighting in the war and takes his family, Evie and her mother, on a holiday to an almost abandoned resort in Florida. There the family meets the Graysons and Peter Coleridge, who served in the Army with Joe. Evie is a typical teenager of any age, wanting to mature and experience love and adulthood sooner than she is ready. She quickly falls in love with Peter and is forced to grow up throughout the summer and subsequent fall.
She discovers that the world, including her idolized family is greatly flawed.
She is faced with secrets about her family that she would have never imagined possible.
She has to make hard decisions about her own morality.
In the end Evie has to decide who she is going to trust and who she is willing to betray.
I loved the setting of the book and the author’s writing. It was very nostalgic and honest.
I also appreciated that all of the characters are presented as flawed and you see them struggle with these flaws in a very real way.
Some of the themes addressed in What I Saw and How I Lied are family, coming of age, justice, morality, and racism and how to reconcile an idealized view of your own family and the world at large with their very real flaws and failures.
I’m going to leave you with the last lines of the book that I absolutely loved, “I would never be what someone else wanted me to be. I would never laugh at a joke I didn’t think was funny. I would never tell another lie. I would be the truth teller, starting today. That would probably be tough. But I was tougher.”
I struggled with my rating of this book on Goodreads. I liked it, but didn’t love it and it’s not going down as a favorite, but I did appreciate it. I ended up giving it 3 stars, but 3 1/2 stars would probably be a better overall assessment.
If you a fan of young adult stories and mysteries set in a historical time period, I think you’ll love What I Saw and How I Lied.