Review: Lie by Caroline Bock

Title: LIE
Series: N/A
Author: Caroline Bock
Publisher: St.Martins Griffin
Publication Date: 30th August 2011
Pages: 224
Special Features: N/A
Goodreads Average Rating: 3.86

Seventeen-year-old Skylar Thompson is being questioned by the police. Her boyfriend, Jimmy, stands accused of brutally assaulting two young El Salvadoran immigrants from a neighboring town, and she’s the prime witness. Skylar is keeping quiet about what she’s seen, but how long can she keep it up?

But Jimmy was her savior. . . .
When her mother died, he was the only person who made her feel safe, protected from the world. But when she begins to appreciate the enormity of what has happened, especially when Carlos Cortez, one of the victims, steps up to demand justice, she starts to have second thoughts about protecting Jimmy. Jimmy’s accomplice, Sean, is facing his own moral quandary. He’s out on bail and has been offered a plea in exchange for testifying against Jimmy.

The truth must be told. . . .
Sean must decide whether or not to turn on his friend in order to save himself. But most important, both he and Skylar need to figure out why they would follow someone like Jimmy in the first place

I was really looking forward to reading this book, and was highly disappointed. The synopsis sounded great and I really believed I was going to enjoy the book.

The book focuses on four friends, who to protect one another from being arrested they are forced to LIE (hence the name of the book) but after an attack on two Hispanic brother's goes from bad to worse, the truth begins to eat them up.

Within the first few pages I was bored and overly confused. But I carried it on, slowly it was becoming interesting, but took a dramatic U-turn and was back to where it started. The only thing motivating me to finish the book was it was a review Galley and I really wanted to prove myself as a reviewer.

The book focuses mainly on loyatly, friendship and racism, but I expected friendship and loyalty to take the bigger role, which apparently it does not. I have only ever read one series about racism before, and found this book quite hard to read due to the racial element's in it. I'm not saying they are handled wrong, because they have not. I am just someone who has never been around such racial attacks, and I possibly believe that it could be toned down a bit more.

Within the book we witness numerous amount's of POV's from many different character's (I counted 10 in total). For me this was good and bad. Firstly it caused a large amount of confusion for me and throughout the book the amount of focus of such a large amount of character's slowly began to prove hard to keep track of when I came across them later on.
But as the book progressed I realised that for the storyline of the book, a large amount of POV's was just right, but maybe not this many. It allowed you to see such a horrible event, through not just one or two eyes, but everyone who seemed to be involved and effected. Also it allowed much more background information on the character's to be shown.

Caroline's writing style was not so good. I felt almost like I was being told instead of shown, which is slightly understandable seeing as a large proportion of the book was based on the past events which had taken place, but even the present parts it seemed to lack allot.

The book was quite hard to read, and on some occasions highly un-believable.
Jimmy, and a number of other character's are very much Racist's, they have strong views that no one from other countries should be allowed in America full stop, and Jimmy's view managed to influence, his small group of main friends: Skylar, Sean and Lisa-Marie, to the point that they begin to think what he says is true. Jimmy is also the school's sport star and it is slightly portrayed in the book that despite everyone in the school knew what really happened, they refused to grass him up because of his position. This for me seemed unbelievable and I just couldn't get to grips with it.

I will only talk about one character, which is Skylar.
I felt almost like Skylar was the only character I properly saw enough to talk about and I would say the main character of the book.
Skylar is the girlfriend of Jimmy, who has been charged of attacking two Hispanic brother's and is still in prison.
Skylar seems very reliatent on her boyfriend and is constantly saying how Jimmy would always have a plan, and Jimmy said this. Also she yearns  to much for him, and seems to care much more about the fact that he is in prison then anything else, at that moment of time (which I guess is believable).
She on the other hand is quite a third-dimensional character, depending on the way you think and see things you may say that her personality and reliance of Jimmy is due to her past, which is discovered in the book.

I give this book...