Krysten’s Review

You know going in that Alice Feeney’s psychological thriller Sometimes I Lie features an unreliable narrator, who (you guessed it!) sometimes lies. But even so, I found myself surprised when those lies were revealed, and even at the end, I’m not sure what was true and what was a lie. Chock full of drama and questions, the book kept me turning pages until the happy ending—or was it happy after all?

The story alternates between the present time, in which Amber Reynolds wakes up in a coma, aware of everything around her but unable to move or respond; the past week leading up to the accident that put her there; and diary entries from childhood. Feeney takes the writer’s advice to torture your characters to the extreme as she throws pretty much every thriller trope she can at her poor protagonist, from amnesia to an obsessive stalker to kidnapping and assault. Be warned, some of these scenes are pretty graphic and disturbing. As a lifelong reader and fiction writer myself, I’m able to suspend my disbelief to a point, but this novel went overboard, to the point where it was almost laughable that all these terrible things could happen to one person.

That said, it was a compelling read, and I finished the book within the space of one day. Given this was Feeney’s debut novel, I would expect her writing to have evolved and matured since this was published in 2018… So I definitely plan to read another of her thrillers in the future.