Sometimes I Lie

Amber Reynolds wants you to know three things. 1) She is in a coma 2) Her husband doesn’t love her anymore 3) Sometimes she lies.

Told in three alternating timelines (now, then, and before) Sometimes I Lie is perfect for lovers of psychological thrillers that enjoy seeing the mystery unravel backwards and like unreliable narrators and characters you can’t quite crack. Amber Reynolds’ observations from within her coma are great and intriguing and it’s even more exciting to go back in time and see the week leading up to the car crash that left her in a coma and the life she lived in 1992. In her life real, before the coma, Amber was married to Paul, a novelist, and worked on a daytime radio talk show. But things were getting out of hand, with her coworker and her sister and an ex from college who just keeps showing up, so how did Amber end up in a coma? Was it an accident, or meant to look like one?

The three timelines are all really really interesting! The “now” which focuses on Amber’s life in her coma has some really dark overtones in it and leads you in one direction, but in “then” which takes place in the week leading up to the coma, you see Amber’s marriage and her work life in a new light. In “before” you see the narrator and her best friend Taylor and see how an unhappy family affects the psyche of children. I can’t pick which one I liked the most because each felt like a really important part of the story and not just added on to be more “interesting” like you see in other books.

Overall, I can see why people loved this book. It had all the elements of a great psychological thriller (attempted murder, hospital drama, family secret, etc) so that made it an quick and enjoyable read.  It had some serious twists and turns and reveals that shocked me even as a reader of the genre. Of course, since Amber is a quintessential unreliable narrator, it’s not that you can trust everything she tells you but as it unravels you begin to unlock who is the real villain (or villains) and what really happened versus what you think happened when the story begins.

If you like books by Gillian Flynn, AJ Finn, etc, you’ll really enjoy this book!