Book Review: "If You Tell a Lie" by Lucinda Berry

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Lucinda Berry writes books about childhood trauma and how it can impact the future we live, especially when the past finally catches up with us. They are usually dramatic thrillers with domestic themes and aspects of crime, class and gender involved. Books like Her First Lie and Off the Deep End are two books which also deal with maternal relationships in the same way that Best of Friends and Saving Noah do. Then we have The Perfect Child and Under Her Care which deal with children who have been abandoned or are very different or labelled as 'difficult'. Books dealing with adult women uncovering secrets such as The Secret of Us and Keep Your Friends Close are also present as examples of how you can never really know everything about another person/people, no matter how much you think you know them. And now, we have a summer-camp setting in If You Tell a Lie. This, I can tell, is going to be absolutely brilliant...

If You Tell a Lie centres on a scandal that breaks out at a camp for affluent teenagers involving a teacher who has apparently abused a number of young girls in his care. After a photograph is taken of the said event by another student, there is a large investigation in which other girls come forward and say that they too were abused in a similar way. Narrated by a group of girls: Blakely - one of the victims of abuse, Meg - the girl who took the photograph, another friend who feels like she can never say no and then of course, Regina - the wife of the accused - this book deals with what happens when a lie spins out of human control and into something else entirely. Lucinda Berry writes another novel in which every character is morally grey and the question we are left asking is: did he do it?

Blakely is a rich-kid extraordinaire. She's flashy, snobby and simply a wretched human being. From the beginning she is unlikeable and yet, she becomes obsessed with one of the camp teachers. She makes a plan to seduce him and in order to prove it, gets her friend Meg to take a photograph of the event. Meg stakes out, takes the photograph and then, it starts to spread around the camp to the point that the teacher in question is arrested and of course, fired from his job. However, Meg is hiding the true story of what happened. Blakely wasn't abused at all and when she tried to seduce the teacher, he flung her off him and carried on with his life. Unfortunately, when the teacher is found dead, there are a whole bunch of other questions to be asked.

We meet Regina in a women's institution. She's hurt her children because of what her husband did to those girls. She is utterly convinced because she was once abused and raped by a gymnastics coach when she was younger and yet, believing that rich people can be trouble, her inmate friend Yolanda, has placed a doubt in her mind about Blakely's story at the trial. With her husband dead from multiple stab wounds, there's really nothing else she can do but wait. As the story drives on, the seeds of doubt in her mind begin to grow. But if he didn't do anything to Blakely, that doesn't mean he didn't do anything to anyone else...

Lucinda Berry's 'seeds of doubt' are part and parcel to what makes her such a respected novelist. She presents us with the idea that two things can be true at the same time. It's one of the reasons I love reading her books. Good and bad aren't always black and white and ultimately, when we look over the facts in order to make it to a perfectly terrifying outcome, a whole bunch of things need to align absolutely perfectly. There are several people involved here and even though some of them may have good intentions, they are still culpable.

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