LS 5623 Advanced Literature for Young Adults

Blundell, Judy. 2008. What I Saw and How I Lied. New York: Scholastic. ISBN 9780439903486


Evie thought everything would be perfect once her stepfather, Joe, returned home from the war. Aside from the friction between Joe's mother and her own, life pretty much was. Except for a few phone calls that always seem to upset Joe. When Joe suggests that they take a vacation down in Florida, it all seems too good to be true.
In Florida they run into a soldier from Joe's company, twenty three year handsome Peter. Evie falls in love, despite her parents' wishes for her to stay away. Little does she know that her age is the least of their concerns for wanting her to stay away from him. A shocking event rocks Evie from her innocent life view and forces her to choose how far loyalty goes and who she will betray.

A true coming of age novel, this book take you back to those awkward years when you're not a little girl, yet not quite a woman either. Evie is always in the shadow of her gorgeous mother, trying on her clothes, working out the mannerisms that make her mother a paragon of femininity. A reviewer from the 2008 School Library Journal says it better than I do, "it is Evie and her rapidly maturing perception of herself and those around her that carry the story. In many ways she becomes the adult in the group, motivated by truth and justice rather than greed or superficial appearances."

The author does a wonderful job of keeping the first person narration, but at the same time letting the reader see and understand things that the young character is not yet able to understand. For instance, the reader understands that her mother is having an affair when Evie mentions that her mother always tips the hotel bellman for washing the orange puffs off of her car every afternoon; and then later when Evie has fled to Peter's house she mentions the same orange puffy flowers falling on the ground. This author also does not shy away from the anti-Semitic prejudices that governed behavior after World War II, which I think will shock young readers, as it did myself. Growing up and learning about the Holocaust, one tends to believe that antisemitism was a European prejudice, and not an American one.

One of the strengths of this novel is the ambiguity of the morality of Evie's decision to essentially cover for her parents while they are on trial for the murder of Peter, the man she was in love with. She doesn't know that her parents did or did not kill him for certain, and indeed it shakes her that she can no longer trust or look up to them. But she lies for them anyway. Perhaps she should have let them go to jail. Isn't that what the justice system is designed for? To convict the guilty? I think had Evie chosen to betray her parents instead of Peter, the reader would had accepted that as the right course of action too.

On the whole, I'd recommend this book to readers from about 8th grade and up.





Image taken from: http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/b/judy-blundell/what-i-saw-and-how-i-lied.htm