I cannot tell a lie…

I can, of course; we all can.  And I’ll admit I was a little apprehensive when my copy of Liar arrived in the mail last week.  What if I don’t like it?  There’s been so much hype, can I give it a fair shake?  What if Justine (with whom I’ve exchanged some emails) turns out to be one of those white women who gets everything wrong when writing a black character?  What if, what if, what if.  So I decided to read another book first, but somehow this morning I woke up and opened Liar instead.  After two days with two social outings, I knew today was going to be a day of silence.  I actually got back into bed with this book–something I never do–because I knew that if I stayed in the living room, I’d constantly be tempted to check email or see what’s on PBS.  I did take a break to make some breakfast, which I made the mistake of eating while Meet the Press was on; Boehner and Graham made me SO ill, I had to turn the TV off and for the rest of the day I lay in bed reading Liar.  The room was full of light, and through the open window I could hear the rattle of tambourines and the agonized screams of a congregation: PRAISE THE LORD!  No ecstasy, just agony.  Why is it taking me this long to share my impressions of this book?  Well, in part because what I read was so totally unexpected, and for the first third of the book, I couldn’t stop thinking about the cover controversy.  That model is SO NOT MICAH…but Micah was also not what I expected.  I’ll be honest: “nappy” is a word I never want to hear coming out of a white person’s mouth.  So when bloggers described Micah that way, I was wary.  Then I heard she was mixed-race but dark-skinned, and I thought, Hmm, that’s unusual (go here to learn more about the author’s intentions regarding Micah’s appearance).  Turns out, Micah is actually a quadroon—someone who is one quarter black (her father is mixed-race and married a white woman).  My grandmother was a quadroon, and she could pass for white; she had straight hair and gray eyes.  Now, genetics being what they are, it is unlikely that a quadroon would be dark-skinned with “nappy” hair, but not impossible.  And probability didn’t turn out to be such an issue for me with this book.  In fact, Micah’s compulsive lying didn’t interest me HALF as much as what gets revealed in the second third of the novel (which I am AMAZED no one leaked during the cover scandal.  Unfortunately, I didn’t read the author’s plea for discretion, so I’ve since removed my spoilers–apologies to the author and readers who are now bummed).  Larbalestier’s prose is so fluid, so easy to consume, I was actually frustrated by the choppy, fragmented nature of the narrative at the beginning and was happy when longer passages developed.  It’s interesting that Micah later admits that successful lying depends upon a lack of details—they’re too hard to keep straight, even if they make a lie more interesting.  The first third of the novel introduces us to a lot of people, a lot of details, and yet only covers a few days, those immediately following the murder of Zach Rubin.  I’ll admit, part of me was looking for flaws in the representation of this young black woman, and I didn’t find any.  Next came a revelation that completely blew my mind—and THEN I was HOOKED.  There are definite traces of Octavia Butler in this book, which is one of the highest compliments I can bestow; Larbalestier handles race, sex, and *community* in a very similar, direct way.  The story is why you’re lying there in bed all day with no urge to get up and check your email.  It’s not the lyrical prose or the breathtaking beauty of the landscape described in minute detail—it’s your utter amazement at the turn the story just took—and takes again, and then again.  I love that Micah is an outsider; her peers at school call her “freak, slut, bitch” and for a while you worry that she’s the stereotypical black girl with hypersexual impulses she can’t seem to control.  But Larbalestier does what Octavia Butler did so well: she turns imposed pathology into a kind of deviance that ultimately empowers the black female character.  Micah does have impulses she can’t control (and boy, could I sympathize, being on the Pill continuously myself and having to watch out for the imminent unibrow).  She has inherited a family condition, and her elders don’t see their condition as a curse or anything less than a gift; they live upstate on a secluded farm where no one notices their difference, but Micah is determined to remain in the city she loves.  And I appreciated that move, too, since I just wrote an essay on the importance of magical things happening HERE and not in some faraway place.  The novel’s ending was a bit abrupt, but it did leave the door open for a sequel…I wanted to know more about the alternate community/family Micah’s relatives created upstate.  They’re roughing it, living off the land with no electricity or running water; what if Micah stayed with them, convinced the elders to accept technology, discovered the genetic secret behind their “gift”?  Instead, Micah becomes a girl with a future and a college community.  Like many of Butler’s characters, she cannot kill without remorse and it’s her compassion that ends up strengthening her extended family.  Yet in the end, Micah is left alone with nothing but memories of the one boy who saw beauty in her.  I wish there had been a Part IV, but for now you’ll just have to rush out and read Micah’s amazing story.