Lies and Consequences

After finishing Caramelo, a tale that adds “healthy lies” to a family story, I moved on to Maile Meloy’s Liars and Saints, a story about a family story affected by its unhealthy lies.

The quickest read so far in my journey through 52 novels was book number 46. I ripped through this 260-page book in a little over a day. Coming on the heels of slow moving Caramelo, it felt great to pick up such a quick read.

Like Caramelo, Liars centers on several generations of a family, this one being a Canadian-American family. While the story touches on ancestry in Canada, it mainly stays California-based. The story deals with the life of a deeply catholic couple that starts a family in the post-World War II era. The mother tries to keep the family from harm by covering up a teen pregnancy. Her deception snowballs into other deceptions and finally the truth comes out and must be confronted. The book deals with faithfulness to the church and to the family. An amazingly readable story, and a great debut novel from Meloy.

I've now moved on to Ira Sher's Gentlemen of Space, thankfully not the story of generations of a family. It's a story of an everyman who is picked to fly to the moon and doesn't return. So far it's pretty good. Still waiting for my wife to finish Mystic River!