This book is seriously warped. Which I guess is the point.

The premise is interesting: Micah Wilkins is a compulsive liar, the ultimate unreliable narrator who promises at the beginning of the book that she’s finally telling the truth. At best, she tells half-truths.

“I’m undecided, stuck somewhere in between, same way I am with everything: half black, half white, half girl, half boy; coasting on half a scholarship.
I’m half of everything.”

It’s safe to say that Micah has some identity issues. She doesn’t know who she really is; her life feels out of control. Unfortunately, the idea of having Micah be completely untrustworthy, with the reader never knowing when she’s lying or what is truth, works against the story finally. Fiction is ultimately not about lies, even though it’s made up; fiction is finally about Truth, or else it’s bad fiction.

I’m not saying Liar is a bad book. But it’s a book that I could never get too close to or identify with completely because I never knew whether any given detail or scene in it was true, true in the world of the book itself. In fact, Micah, the narrator, tells us over and over again that at least some of the story she tells isn’t true. But she also says that she mixes a thread of truth into her lies. Well, of course she does; I couldn’t even trust her to be completely unreliable —or completely insane.

The book does have some offensive sexual content, the requisite dollop of violence, and a bit of bad language, but the part that really annoyed me was this almost offhand scene near the middle of the book:

“What do you think?” Lisa interjected, addressing the class. “What is it about writing for teenagers that leads to so much censorship?”
I knew the answer to that one but I didn’t raise my hand. It’s because grown-ups don’t remember what it was like when they were teenagers. Not really. They remember something out of a Disney movie and that’s where they want to keep us. They don’t like the idea of our hormones, or that we can smell sex on one another. That we walk down halls thick with a million different pheromones. We see each other, catch a glance, the faintest edge of one, that sends a shiver through our bodies all the way down to the parts of us our parents wish didn’t exist.

Nonsense. I don’t know whether those are just Micah’s warped thoughts or whether that explanation for the controversy over the sexualization of young adult literature is the author’s own interpretation. Either way, most book censors aren’t trying to infantilize teens, and neither are those who simply observe that the over-sexualization and the crude language found in many YA books is pandering to their (our) basest instincts. In fact, those who say that we should give teens something besides raging hormones in their books, that teens themselves are more than just their hormones, are showing respect for young adults. If anyone is trying to dupe and dumb down teens and keep them in a Disney movie world, it’s those authors and others who tell them that they’re too young for a committed relationship (marriage) but they’re also too immature to control their sexual appetites. So they have no other choices besides sexual promiscuity, guilt, heartbreak, and please-at-least-practice-safe-sex. Infants and young children have limited control over their needs and desires. Adults, even young adults, can choose to delay gratification, or they can choose to gratify their desires within the safety of a loving committed relationship (marriage). As one who thinks we can do better than pander, I don’t want to deny that young adults are sexual beings; I want us to be mentors who help them to discipline and express their sexuality responsibly rather than panderers who leave them to burn uncontrollably with no hope of having a fulfilled and healthy marriage and sexual relationship.

And I’ve gone off on a ranting tangent. Liar is maybe a study in insanity, maybe a picture of a very conflicted and confused young lady, maybe even an indictment of our society’s failure to give young adults clear messages about their sexual, racial and moral identities. But it doesn’t quite work for me, and I suspect won’t for most of its teen audience, because the whole thing may just be One (very artful) Big Fat Lie.