Review: The Last Time I Lied

**5 Goodreads Stars**

“But the past clings to the present. All those mistakes and humiliations following us as we march inevitably forward. There’s no ignoring them.”

If you had the chance to return to a place where your worst nightmares came true if it meant you might be able to face them, would you?

That’s the premise of Riley Sager’s The Last Time I Lied, the second of books published under Sager’s currently alias. I read Sager’s Final Girls last year and rated it 3/5 stars. My review can be found here. One of the reasons I rated Final Girls 3/5 stars was because I am not a huge fan of horror, and I think that’s what turned me off. Nonetheless, Sager is a fantastic writer, drawing you into the story with lush prose.

Emma is an up and coming artist who is struggling to paint, haunted by a dark past that is literally part of every single painting she has made. As a teenager, she was sent to an all-girls camp for rich kids called Camp Nightingale. There, three of her bunkmates disappeared in the middle of the night, never to be seen or found again. Emma was the last camper to see the three girls – Vivian, Natalie, and Allison– and has felt guilt over their disappearance ever since. The three girls are always the first things she paints, hidden behind the main subject but always lurking in the shadows.

Emma is asked to return to the camp for its reopening since the girls’ disappearance many, many years ago. Initially, she hesitates. However, Emma’s burning desire to find out what happened to her friends propels her to return to Camp Nightingale. Her return is met with suspicion, but she is there to discover something, anything, that will help her find closure and help solve the mystery of the missing girls.

This book has all the elements of an engaging mystery: an all-girls camp shrouded in mystery; love and tortured teenage romance; questionable camp staff who have suspicious backstories; and archaeological ruins that may hold the clue to the girls’ disappearance.

Things go awry the minute Emma goes to camp. She is terrorized by someone who claims to know what happened to the girls and who believes Emma is responsible for their disappearance. Does Emma hold the secret to finding the girls? Has she suppressed her memories of what took place that fateful night? Or is someone else concealing the truth?

I am so excited to see where Riley Sager’s writing takes us next. Sager is the master of suspense, building tension slowly and intentionally. Sager also makes you care deeply about all the characters, even when the book is told in the first person. Thank you to the author, the publisher, Random House/Penguin, and Edelweiss+ for an advanced reviewer copy of The Last Time I Lied.

Review: Artemis

**3 Goodreads Stars**

I really, really, REALLY wanted to love this book because the premise sounded enticing and I enjoyed the movie version of Andy Weir’s prior book, The Martian. Unfortunately for Artemis, I just finished reading a 5 chapter excerpt of Annalee Newitz’s sci-fi thriller Autonomous, which I could not put down. Artemis paled in comparison to Autonomous. 

Let’s start with the good, which is what earned this book 3 stars. The plot was what kept me going, though a major spoiler happened fairly early in the book (which could have been drawn out much longer in my humble opinion). The book was action-packed and fast-paced. While I am not into the nitty-gritty details of how things work, the author also paid close attention to the minutiae of all the tech and gadgets in the book. Weir has built a somehwat convincing environment and world, one that I could easily imagine on the screen.

The plot involves Jazz, a lower class employee working as a freight porter on a colony on the moon (known as “Artemis”). The moon has become habitable (though questionably so for those who have little money), and has become a popular place for wealthy tourists from Earth. Jazz aspires to become one of the elite, to enjoy the pleasures reserved for the moon’s über wealthy residents, by smuggling freight deemed illegal by moon colony standards. Jazz compromises what little ethics she has by accepting an offer to engage in corporate espionage, which, if successful, will guarantee her a life of wealth and leisure.

Now to the bad. Like Artemis, Autonomous features an enterprising young female lead in a futuristic world where corporations own nations (or in the case of Artemis, the moon) and people often engage in questionable behavior simply in order to survive. Both leads are also smart, science-oriented females who use their wits to outfox society’s oppressive rules and their corporate overlords. Artemis, however, fails where Autonomous succeeds; Autonomous creates a believable character who goes by female pronouns and the name Jack, whereas Artemis trivialized the experience of rough and tough welder/smuggler named Jazz who goes by female pronouns. You can’t simply write in a female smuggler/welder to be considered a progressive author; you need to understand her motivations (beyond sexuality/sex and $$, because believe it or not women are more interesting than that: for the latter issue, see below), her struggles, and her life.

As another reviewer (https://www.goodreads.com/BookswithEmilyFox) put it, the female lead (Jazz) was sexualized to the point it felt as though the author could not possibly imagine what goes on in the mind of a savvy woman. There were numerous moments where the character mentioned how sexy she was out of the blue; in one case, Jazz discussed the possibility of a wet t-shirt contest after being splashed with a little water in what was a completely non-sexual scene. One of the scientists with whom Jazz was working also constantly asked her about her sexual behavior after devising a reusable condom that he asked her to test out (really??!). Perhaps if it was just a few isolated comments I wouldn’t care, but seemingly scientific and tense scenes were constantly interrupted by awkward sexual comments and scenarios that were really out of place (and obnoxious, and, more importantly, out of character for Jazz).

Though this is not explored in depth, Jazz and her father are from Saudi Arabia, and Jazz’s father is a practicing Muslim. I felt like this was sort of an afterthought rather than something truly explored. I’d be curious to see how this element of Jazz’s identity is examined if this book is turned into a film.

Finally, there were a few instances where I was left shaking my head at the language used. The author (in the voice of Jazz) used the words “whorish” and “ghetto” in different scenes. Just like the sex comments, these phrases seemed really out of character for Jazz, a young woman who is both poor and objectified by the men surrounding her.