Larbalestier, Justine. Liar.

Larbalestier, Justine. Liar.
Bloomsbury see St. Martins 2009 376p 16.99 978-1-59990-305-7 hs Liar combines the original writing style of Justine Larbalestier with current popular topics, in this case the werewolf, and adds the drama of an inner city teenagers and a murder and creates a truly unique novel. Liar combines the right ingredients to make a high school student turn each page in anticipation. In How to Ditch Your Fairy, Larbalestier shows us creativity whereas in Liar, she has gone to the next step in what will be a very successful writing career. The reader wants to believe Micah, but this protagonist is an edgy, independent, teenager who has two problems, she is a compulsive liar and she is a werewolf. The reader is led through a maze of chapters which have titles like “Before”, “After”, and “Family History” in which Larbalestier divulges lie after lie and finally, truth after truth, maybe! After the brutal murder of Micah’s boyfriend, everybody is suspected of the crime. Micah knows she didn’t do it, but as a werewolf, could she have torn Zach apart during one of her runs through Central Park? It doesn’t help that she is stalked by another teenager who appears from time to time throughout the book. Despite being a pariah at her school, she is befriended by Zach’s best friends briefly; however, it is in the unraveling of Micah’s life details in which the reader relishes each chapter. Micah takes her daily pill to prevent her transformation to werewolf, but this is not enough to keep her parents from discovering that they have made a mistake in keeping her in the city. They return her to the Greats, Micah’s paternal family, who resides on a farm in Connecticut, where she learns what is most important to her in life is to follow her dream of becoming a researcher and biologist, especially of DNA, in order to learn all about werewolves and horizontal gene transfer. Even at the end, we wonder if Micah is telling the truth! Maybe the entire novel was a lie. Squaresky, Martha