The Lying Game by Ruth Ware

I approached The Lying Game with a great deal of trepidation—you see, Ruth Ware has hurt me before. When our relationship was in the honeymoon phase of In a Dark, Dark Wood, it was all smart dialogue this and taut suspense that. But of course, the honeymoon had to end sometime. And end it did with The Woman in Cabin 10…I wasted the best 384 pages of my life on that far-fetched snooze-fest. Needless to say (but I will anyway), I started this book with a healthy dose of cynicism and a dash of hope.

The Lying Game presents itself as a mystery/thriller, and I have to admit my interest was piqued faster than it took Bob the dog to find that telltale body part in the Reach and kick off the world’s most depressing reunion. We’re introduced to Kate, Thea, Fatima, and, our feckless narrator and lead protagonist, Isa when Isa receives a 3:30 am text from Kate that simply says, “I need you.” Ware subtly reveals the nature of the group’s dynamic with a haunting, but resolute, observation:

She’ll be waiting for our replies. But she knows what we’ll say—what we’ve always said, whenever we’ve got that text, those three words.
I’m coming.
I’m coming.
I’m coming.

The four women (and, alarmingly, Isa’s six-month old daughter, Freya) meet at The Mill, aka Kate’s ramshackle death trap right on the Reach, held together by secrets and duct tape. There, they discuss the discovery of the body part and the ramifications if its owner is identified. Through a series of interwoven flashbacks, you learn that the four girls attended a local boarding school together for almost one year, where Kate’s father, Ambrose, was an art teacher. The girls played “The Lying Game,” in which they could score points based on the lie, the target, and whether they believed you. When they weren’t building their reputations as liars who can’t be trusted, they were spending every weekend at The Mill, drinking, smoking, being sketched by Ambrose, swimming, and crushing on Kate’s French step-brother, Luc.

The group spends their morose girls getaway dancing around the real reason they’re all there, and explaining their presence to the townfolk under the guise of their 15-year class reunion—which is conveniently the same week. This alibi is more complicated than it sounds, though, once you discover that they were all kicked out of school the end of that first year together for a salacious reason that is not fully explained until the book is almost over. This is where I’ll leave the remainder of the plot to the author and share the Good and the Bad of The Lying Game.

The Good:

-It’s self-aware: 

The characters were made flesh and blood by their self-awareness. They were aggravating and difficult to empathize with a lot of the time (particularly when you discover their motivations for committing the act that led to the whole FUBAR), but Isa recognized, acknowledged, and embraced that…sometimes with apologies and self-flagellation, sometimes with mere acceptance. I can respect that.

-Solid descriptive writing: 

Ware did an excellent job of transporting you to the scenes and alongside the characters. I could feel the splinters on the floor and cool breeze creeping through the windows at the eroding mill, lament the heat on my neck during one of Isa’s impetuous walks to town, glimpse Thea’s bloodied nails, bitten to the quick, and feel my defenses go up when confronted by Mary Wren’s thick, grizzled physicality.

-The fervor of their friendship: 

This almost ended up on the naughty list, but I changed my mind once I changed my perspective. I felt the women acted entirely too close based on the fact that they didn’t form as a group until the beginning of the school year, didn’t even make it to the end of the year, nine or 10 months later, and haven’t all been together in 17 years. But then I remembered how even the briefest of friendships can be fierce and life-altering at that age, especially when they literally spent every day together. I came to find their unyielding love, even in the absence of physical proximity, realistic and all the more heartbreaking.

-The ending: 

Don’t worry, no spoilers ahead. While I did have a solid handle on the twists before they were revealed, the ultimate twist at the end was one I had overlooked the possibility of. I also found the bittersweet conclusion more realistic than anticipated.

The Bad:

-Motherhood…apparently: 

I’m not sure if Ware has kids, but the way in which she wrote baby Freya makes me hope not. Real talk: I hated that fictional kid by page 20 thanks to gems like these:

Sleepy, squawking cries…,” “…a red-faced indignant Freya who takes one affronted look at me…,” “She swivels her eyes sideways to regard him dubiously…,” “…her eyes fly open in offended shock, her face crumpling into a sudden wail of annoyance and hunger,” “She is dark-eyed and angry, bashing her cross little fist against my chest..

If this book doesn’t do well as a thriller, it may have a second life as an advocate for birth control. I also thought Isa was a horrible mother for a myriad of reasons, but most importantly because she brought her 6-month old to a dangerous shack in the middle of a sinking bog. There, she proceeded to pay little attention to her, left her on beds or floors stories above where she was, and didn’t even consider how the dangerous nature of their “reunion” was no place for a child. God forbid she left her alone with her father, who is treated like a one-dimensional character incapable of caring for his baby.

-Uneven pacing: 

Sometimes the book had me rapt and attentive, other times I was treated to irrelevant flashbacks and characters almost saying something interesting, only to be plot-blocked by phrases like,”She didn’t finish, but she didn’t need to. We all know what we did.” I’m not sure if that was meant to be intriguing, it just ended up frustrating me.

-Surprisingly, very little lying:

For a book called The Lying Game, there was very little lying! They introduce you to the game and its rules, they even had a score sheet in one of their dorm rooms, but you only hear three or four lies as part of the game. If you take it to really only mean the main “mystery,” they didn’t really lie to anyone except themselves. It’s approached as a series of lies that have affected their lives for almost 20 years, but when you really look closely, you’ll see it’s guilt and omission, not lying.

TL;DR:
The Lying Game isn’t a bad book…but it isn’t a great book, either. Viewed through the lens of friendship, guilt, and childhood lost, it’s engaging—but falls quite short of its thriller/mystery aspirations. Much like the tide of the Reach, my interest in the story and the characters ebbed and flowed. Overall, it’s worth a read, but don’t expect too much; I’ve learned the hard way that when it comes to Ruth Ware books, you need to be Wary…get it?