Before I Go to Sleep - SJ Watson

Christine wakes one morning in an unfamiliar bed next to a stranger with grey hair and a wedding ring. Though they're usually younger and single, the experience isn't a new one, but Christine has no recollection of the night before. she tiptoes to the bathroom, and that's when things start to become strange - her hands are wrong, old, and she's got a band on her left ring finger. Startled, she looks in the mirror and sees the face of a stranger - an old woman.
According to the man, Ben, eighteen years earlier Chris was in an accident that caused a rare form of amnesia - she can retain information for a day, but as soon as you gos to sleep for more than a nap it all goes. Sometimes she can remember parts of her twenties, and sometimes she thinks she's a girl, but she never remembers anything leading up to the accident or following it.
That premise is what lead me to pick up Before I Go to Sleep, and the idea of an exploration of identity reconstruction is fascinating. However, Watson's added a tense element - Chris discovers a journal, kept for weeks, where her previous selves details fragments they remember of their old life and secret therapy sessions with Dr Nash, a psychologist Ben refused to let see her. She learns about things Ben has kept from her, apparently to reduce distress, including the existence and death of their son. And on the cover of the journal, underlined, is the warning "Don't trust Ben!"
As the journal progresses Chris learns more about herself and her life, and becomes increasingly distrustful - about Ben, her therapist, and the reliability of the journal entries she wrote but can't remember. She also discovers that the act of writing things down has, as Dr Nash hoped, has allowed the waking her to retain some of that information. It also let her build up a more coherent picture of her post-accident life, including a lengthy stay is a psychiatric unit.
Perhaps my favourite aspect of Before I Go to Sleep is the beautifully executed unreliable narrator - like the very different but equally compelling We Need to Talk About Kevin, the single voice illuminates and clouds, creating a nivel that is both literary and genuinely gripping. As Anita Shreve says on the jacket, Before I Go to Sleep is "Brilliant in its pacing, profound in its central question, suspenseful on very page." I absolutely couldn't say it better myself. - Alex

Liar - Justine Larbalestier

From her first freshman day at her new school, when she was mistaken for a boy and didn't correct her homeroom teacher, everyone knew that Micah Wilkins lies. But Micah has good reason not to tell the truth - her family has a shocking secret that she has to protect, a secret that would horrify all the kids who already think she's weird, and involve the media and scientists. But when her classmate and secret boyfriend, kind of, popular boy Zach is found dead and mutilated in Central Park, everything starts to come undone, and Micah has to tell the truth, at least to her reader. Or does she?
Micah's a sympathetic and intriguing character. Lying is an ingrained habit and though she vows at the beginning to tell the truth, Micah confesses to lying during her narrative, often about really significant details and events. And somehow her lies make her outrageous story more believable, as well as keeping the reader on their toes and glued to the page - with each statement and revelation one has to ask if this, too, is a lie, a truth, a half truth, an exaggeration, an omission or a distortion. And this complexity includes her character, the structure of the novel (which twists between the past and the present, in a non-linear winding I found compelling), and the dance of the narrative.
There's certainly scope in Liar for literary analysis - metaphors abound, and Micah herself straddles several worlds: she's bi-racial (black and white), her father's American and her mother French, she hovers between childhood and adulthood, the country and the city, insular and cosmopolitan, and she's an outsider by both circumstance and choice. Above all there's space for a wide variety of interpretations - with such an unreliable narrator almost every aspect of Micah's story is up for debate, including whether the things she confess to as lies are truth.
That does not make Liar boring and literary, however - the plot and the character are engaging for the duration, and the sensation of never being able to rely on her version of events is novel. I can see, however, how some readers would find this disquieting or unpleasant. Similarly I can see how some readers could find the central twist unconvincing and forced.
Not knowing Micah's secret going in is key to engagement with the plot, so I won't even hide it as a spoiler. How the reader responds to this revelation will affect how they feel about the text as a whole - it certainly kinks the genre, which will be disruptive for some, while others will embrace both the concept of the secret and the fact that the reader's left with ambiguity: is Micah delusional, substituting an unpalatable reality for a fantastic alternate version of her reality, or is she really what she believes? I was left thinking the former, and saw hints of this throughout the text, but almost anything is possible. If you're interested in a young adult novel that's strongly written and leaves you thinking, but unconventionally composed and unpredictable, this is for you. - Alex

Identical – Ellen Hopkins

Mirror-image twins Kayleigh and Raeanne used to be inseparable, but that was before the accident, eight years earlier. Their district-court judge father crashed the car, scarring his politician wife and fracturing the family. Not long after that Raymond began climbing into bed with Kayleigh – all she wants is her icy mother’s love, but Kay is always away from home campaigning. All Raeanne wants is her father’s love, even if it came at the price Kayleigh is so reluctant to pay. Now the twins barely talk and their lives only marginally intersect, though they think about one another all the time.
As Raeanne increasingly desperately seeks love elsewhere, and fills the void at her centre with purging, drugs and alcohol, Kayleigh feels increasingly dirty and insignificant, until only bingeing and cutting help her feel anything. Something has to change, but how?
Identical is entirely laid out as non-rhyming verse – each sister described events in free-form, sometimes shaped, verses, with change in voice indicated by poems on facing pages that highlight the same words but in a different way. That’s not very clear, so a brief example may help. On one page will be a six verse poem by one twin; on the facing page the other twin has a similarly constructed poem that highlights the same word or words:

I’ve Got to Learn
To say no, and not only say
it, but mean it. In some
situations, but not always
the right ones. I know,
I’m strong.

If Only
I could say yes, Ian, get close to me.
But it’s a place no one should ever be,
and it would be cruel to let him think
I’m strong*

The shared words create their own poem, sometimes differently punctuated (“evil. isn’t born it’s created?” and “evil? isn’t born it’s created.” for example) but mirroring the similarities between them despite their differences.
Had I know about this style going in I may have been hesitant to read the book, particularly as I generally dislike poetry inserted into the middle of a novel - it's usually banal poetry, at that, and does nothing to enhance the plot. In Identical, however, the poetry is integral to the reading, well crafted, and is so powerful in both theme and construction that once I started I really had trouble putting it down. Hopkins has clearly thoroughly researched the psychology of sexual abuse, not only the effect of the victims but the victimisers and those around them. The conflicting emotions, underlying distress, coping mechanisms, and portrayal not only of Raeanne and Kayleigh but of those around them is lucidly and beautifully, powerfully expressed. As the narrative continues we see wilful blindness all around, and there’s a stunning revelation that took me by surprise.
One of the things I most admire and envy in Lynn is her ability to foresee twists like this, so that when I told her about Identical while I was only part way through she predicted the revelation – a writer herself, she says that’s because that’s what she’d do but it still amazes me. Anyway, although I… not enjoyed, but was drawn into and powerfully affected by Identical, and though Hopkins has written four other novels (according to the jacket), I won’t be returning to her work for a while, as it’s quite overwhelming. I will return, though – I just need a frothy break first. - Alex

*The Blogger formatting won't let me space it as it is in the book so this will have to suffice

We Have to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

Franklin and Eva Khatchadourian were in almost every way polar opposites - a location finder, he was staunchly American, Republican, and saw no need to leave home and see the rest of the world. Eva, on the other hand, was a Democrat who loved to travel and created one of the first budget travel guides for young Americans going overseas. Despite this they were deeply compatible and deeply in love. Until the decision - almost wholly Franklin's - to have a child.
Three days before his sixteenth birthday, their son Kevin went to his school armed and shot adults and children. In a series of deeply honest and revealing letters to her absent husband, whom she still deeply loves, Eva explores how this happened, alternating a fairly chronological sequence with more contemporary events, including visiting Kevin in jail. In the process she discusses and analyses their marriage and discloses details about her relationship with and attitude toward Kevin that Franklin had not previously been told about. As the letters go one way, Eva projects Franklin's responses to some of her reports and replies to them, so at times there's almost a dialogue through which we learn more about the polarising effect of Kevin's presence on his parents.
This is one of the most difficult reviews I've written in a long time, primarily because the unfolding details are an integral part of the narrative style so I've tried to balance plot description with keeping surprises intact. We Need to Talk About Kevin is perhaps the most gripping and fascinating book I've read this year. Eva's voice is opinionated and merciless, filled with tart asides and commentary, and she would certainly be difficult to live with. Far from a 'born mother' she dislikes virtually every aspect of motherhood, a confession that is both markedly contrary to community expectation and familiar to many women.
The unrelieved first person account is a magnificent example of the unreliable narrator - hers is the only perspective we have of Kevin; though she includes Franklin's increasingly starry-eyed view of his beloved son, Eva makes it clear that she thinks he's unable to face what she sees as the truth. I was compelled by her interpretations of Kevin's behaviour, from infancy to adolescence, which never allow for anything but malice. At the same time I increasingly asked whether he was really born bad or if it was Eva's unrelenting hostility that created this annihilating child, and this tension forms an integral part of the reading experience.
After writing my review I checked what other readers had written, and was struck by how many Amazon reviewers disliked the book because Eva was unsympathetic. She's certainly not warm and fuzzy, but for me that was an intrinsic part of the novel's attraction. In some ways her unsentimental pragmatism and clear outlook reminded me of Lynn, which may have made me more sympathetic toward her. Well, that and my own perception that gestating fetuses are parasitic, babies are the more egotistic creation on earth, small children sometimes go out of their way to be annoying, being a mother is ludicrously difficult, and instant mother-child bonds are vanishingly rare.
Provided you can be comfortable with a protagonist who shares these, and even harsher, opinions about her own offspring then you, too, may find We Need to Talk About Kevin a fascinating, resonant and compelling read that deserves its prominent position on best seller lists and book group schedules. If, however, you prefer your mother figures doting and cosy, you may prefer to pass. - Alex