Title: My Lies, Your Lies by Susan Lewis
Publisher: William Morrow
Genre: Contemporary, Mystery
Length: 413 pages
Book Rating: C+
Complimentary Review Copy Provided by Publisher Through Edelweiss
Summary:
For readers of Lisa Jewell and Diane Chamberlain comes another gripping novel from internationally bestselling author Susan Lewis, about an eccentric old woman, the ghostwriter helping write her memoirs, and the destructive secrets binding them together.
She’s rewriting history, but which version of the truth will she tell?
Joely tells other people’s secrets for a living. As a ghost writer, she’s used to scandal – but this just might be her strangest assignment yet. Freda has never told her story to anyone before. But now she’s ready to set the record straight and right a wrong that’s haunted her for forty years.
Freda’s memoir begins with a 15-year-old girl falling madly in love with her male teacher. As Joely sets out to write this troubling love story, she is spun into a world of secrets and lies she could never have imagined, causing her to question everything she thought she knew about her own family.
Delving further into Freda’s past, Joely’s sure she can uncover the truth—but at what cost?
Breathlessly intriguing from the first page to the last, My Lies, Your Lies is a gripping novel that intertwines the tumultuous past of one mysterious woman to the present of another with a harrowing, unexpected twist.
Review:
My Lies, Your Lies by Susan Lewis is an intriguing novel with a touch of mystery.
Ghostwriter Joely Foster is grateful her latest job will take her away from problems at home. She is headed off on a bit of a mysterious and somewhat puzzling assignment since she will be ghostwriting the memoir of a well-known author. Freda Donahoe is rather eccentric and she tells the story she wants heard in a very precise manner. The experience she is revealing takes places during 1968 and involves a love affair between fifteen year old Freda and her twenty-five year old music instructor David Michaels aka “Sir”. Joely’s attempts to guess how the story ends are rebuffed by Freda who turns Joely’s world upside down with shocking revelations and accusations. But what happens next is truly frightening and Joely grows more terrified with every passing hour. Will she figure a way out of an increasingly desperate situation?
Joely is a well-drawn character whose domestic life is in shambles. Her marriage is in serious trouble and her relationship with her fifteen year old daughter Holly is precarious. Joely is close to her mother Marianne and brother Jamie. She does not know quite how to take Freda, whose moods turn on a dime. She is also uncomfortable with some of the intimate details Freda wants in her memoir.
My Lies, Your Lies has an intriguing premise but it is a very slow paced for the first half of the story. The dramatic and isolated setting is atmospheric and somewhat foreboding. Freda is an interesting yet somewhat unlikable character who is rather manipulative. The storyline is clever and features a book within a book as chapters alternate between events in the present and Freda’s memoir. At the halfway point, the story picks up steam as Freda’s disclosures and actions stun Joely. With a serious of unanticipated twists, Susan Lewis brings this novel to a rather unconventional conclusion.
