by Kristopher Jansma
ages: adult
First sentence: “I’ve lost every book I’ve ever written.”
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I’ve been wondering about  how to blog about this ever since I started it, really.  See: it’s not a book where you can tidily sum up the plot, giving you a character arc and a climax. It’s not really a book where the author divulges secrets or sucks the reader in with thrills.

No, it’s more a book of ideas: of lies and truth and the nature of stories.

The things you need to know before going in: 1) the narrator remains nameless, and you never learn his true name. And 2) he’s incredibly unreliable. It’s not like in Code Name Verity, where you learn one side of the story, and then have the second half throw everything into question. No: after the first chapter, you start wondering where the Lies end and the Truth begins. Or, if even there is a Truth to be told.

In fact, about half way through, I ran across this passage, and it struck me that this is the heart of what Jansma was trying to illustrate:

Ours is a new generation of plagiarists. Armed with Wikipedia and Google, we can manufacture our own truths. What else should we expected in an age whenever the real reporters, off in the Middle East, sent back only government-approved messages? Move over Jennings and Murrow. No need for the cold, uninterpreted facts. Make was for Stewart and Colbert! In our era, truthiness is in the dictionary, and Dan Rather got fired for not authenticating the Killian documents. And in his wake we’ve found, twisting and shouting, the Bill O’Reillys and the Chris Matthewses, spinning us sugar-sweet falsehoods. Plagiarism, class, is the new American art form.

He takes this idea — of spinning us what we want to believe — and takes pushes it to the edge, giving us an narrator who is constantly changing the story, the names of the characters themselves, the basic facts. What are we, as readers, to believe?

Well, only one thing: that you won’t be able to put this fascinating novel down.