Beautiful Lies – Final Book Review

Easily one of the Top 10 Worst Books of All Time, in my opinion. It is just bad, horribly bad.

Perhaps because I had been looking forward to reading it the most – or perhaps because I thought it would, as I said earlier be more like the film Sliding Doors. But, I was greatly disappointed.

Whenever you critique something, any good writer should have no trouble in explaining exactly why. Perhaps, in that sense I am not a good writer then, as I have had some difficulty in explaining why this book is just so bad.

But then again, there are just so many things wrong with it, that it is just hard to begin. Everything is just wrong with it – the characters are flat, the plot is just shoddy at best, the writing somewhat juvenile. The only thing that I consistently enjoyed reading was the descriptions of NYC as a whole, which unfortunately was few and far in-between.

The book is completely devoid of any strong characters – Ridley with her passivity and fluidity certainly doesn’t count and Jake doesn’t either since his character seesaws between being very masculine to almost kitten-like, cute, harmless and pathetically helpless – and has no redeeming male figures, with the one exception being a NYPD officer who appears and disappears throughout the book just as easily as Casper the friendly ghost walks through walls.

In regards to the eventual antagonist(s), though a case can be said that all the characters are each in their own little way, there is not an ounce of redeeming qualities, complexities, or anything of that sort.  It’s completely unrealistic; no character – apart from Disney – should ever be painted as such.

Now, to be fair, she does offer a voice of dissent – through Ridley’s inner dialogue – as one way to present validity to the others’ point of view and “end game.” But that almost immediately gets intertwined with numerous misdeeds, any points against the author’s (and consequently Ridleys)  sentiment are completely invalidated.

For those who are interested in learned more, just comment below and I will explain in more detail.

Moving on, past the halfway point, the plot simply becomes utterly ridiculous. At one point Ridley stupidly runs out into the street late at night ominously, after being tormented and nearly killed a few times, merely to get away from under the “world of lies” that she had lived under her entire life. This after a series of days filled with new developments about her identity, being run off the road, witnessing a murder, and being lied to and misled by literally everyone she has ever known.

And if you think that’s unbelieveable, she ends up wandering the streets of Manhattan until dawn – though since she does this at least 3 different times in the book, so its hard to tell – without ever getting cold (improbable), tired (highly unlikely even in the best circumstances), hungry (after all that walking, not a chance in Hell), and unharmed (all of these characters are looking for you for various reasons, but somehow you escape them all, but they easily find you other places?).

It’s just stretching my imagination just a bit too much.

As for my final review, I say save your time and brain cells and pick any other book than this one.

Beautiful Lies: A Mid-Book Review

This was one of the 3 books I had the most promise for, but it certainly is one if the books that I.am the most disappointed in. Its description presented itself more like a Sliding Doors type of set-up,  where one small event like missing a subway train, can change your life.

But this book has a big event that.changes the protagonist, Ridley. One of the many ways this story is offputting is the use of the first person narrative. It’s used as a way to make it easier to connect to reader with character, to draw the reader in.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work quite so well for me. The way Unger writes it seems to impose her thoughts on me, and I severely dislike that as I disagree with her on most points.

Her character, Ridley went to NYU -also where I went – but is absurdly closed minded about the way families, relationships, and life is until this one event happens. She seems to be having a delayed awakening and coming realizes that everything she had once believed is a lie. But at NYU, you tell to realize early on that people can be very different and your perception of the world will change quite rapidly, or in fact any progressive college will do that for you.

Unfortunately, it almost reads as if Lisa Unger merely picked NYU as her character’s college with ever having any insight at to what it is really like there.

The character of Ridley just seems to immature for someone nearing her 30s and not even in the way of I-stay-up-all-night-drinking-and-partying way (many NYers I feel have an extended college/drunken experience but that’s a topic for another day) but rather in I-have-the-same-ideologies-and-belief-system-that-I-did-when-I-five sort of way. It is quite sad and horrifying to read.

I wish I could stop – or at least Google the ending – but my desire to know the ending weighs on my mind more.

And there are good things about the book such as the way NYC plays a significant role. Unger takes on an exploratory tour of the East Village, naming places and restsurants which gives the story authenticity. Being a NYCer, I love books, films, etc. that celebrate and feature the city.

If only I could appreciate the other aspects of her story telling.
Unger just oversells the story. For example, in writing about Ridley’s love of lit Christmas trees in dark rooms, she uses two sentences – one to mention the Christmas tree in a dark room – then another sentence to describe her love of it. That additional – and rather pointless – information causes a break in the subdued tone of the scene.

If Unger wanted to convey that information, she could have easily written, “Max sat in the dark room in the gleam of sparkling lights on Christmas tree, which was – and contunues to be – one of my favorite sights.” As opposed to, “…[I] found uncle Max sitting by himself in the dim light of the room before our gigantic Christmas tree. That’s one of my favorite things in the world, the sight of a lit Christmas tree in a darkened room.” Both more or less convey the same message but the former is less jarring to the reader, is concise, and doesn’t break the tone of the scene.

But in that sense, it certainly a good exercise for writers to read in only to practice trying to create smoother transitions, creating concise sentences, and learning not to add superfluous information unrelated to the narrative.

But of all the things I have read thus far in this book, one statement has struck me the hardest.

The universe conspires to reveal the truth and make the path easy, if you have the courage to follow the signs.

The sentiment of that phrase is one of most meaningful and significant ones that I read. I only wish that it was a bot conciser but still it was beautifully written.

Beautiful Lies – Opening Review

Is it bad that when you are already starting to hate a book and you haven’t even finished the opening chapter?

Reading Beautiful Lies right now. Not only do I feel like being beaten over the head with the archaic view of traditional families – over and over and over again – but also am undergoing the biggest informational dump and backstory – all in italics – in the history of literature. It almost reads as the introductory synopsis to a high school’s English Literature anthology. It’s is quite ridiculous.

I am not even exactly sure why Lisa Unger, the author, even gets the idea that such an extended opening is ok. Keep it short and allow the “additional” information develop in bits and pieces in the story. It opened well – the first few paragraphs or so – with a woman sitting in the dark waiting gripping a bat in one hand and the phone in the other. But it goes downhill from there quickly… and it is just the epigraph!

I can only hope that it improves from here, but right now I am certainly not excited to continue reading