Hello beautiful people! Welcome to a new review! For this review, I get into another by an author who I have checked out and enjoyed before Everyone Here is Lying by Shari Lapena. I checked out her book Not a Happy Family last year and really enjoyed it so I was looking forward to checking out this read for a while, just took me a bit to get my hands on a copy. Everyone Here is Lying gives exactly what you think it would from the title and is a twisty mystery thriller that revolves around a family with more secrets than you can imagine, and a missing daughter that threatens to expose it all. It’s a book that keeps you guessing while also getting your blood boiling with untrustworthy and suspicious characters.
Main Characters:
- William: Married to Erin but is having an affair with their neighbour Nora, after his affair ends makes some bad decisions that lead to him coming home to find that his 9-year-old daughter Avery is missing, in her disappearance is worried that his many secrets will be exposed and they will blame him for her being gone, must try to figure out what happened to his daughter while also trying to keep his many skeletons in the closet
- Erin: Wife to William and mother to Michael and Avery, is stunned when her son calls her in a panic saying that his little sister is missing, is only thinking about finding her daughter in her time of need but also finds out that there may be much more to the story that she was unaware of
- Avery: A spunky 9-year-old who has an array of conditions and disorders that make her oppositional and defiant, is a hard kid to deal with when she is sent home from her after-school activity early one day her family comes home to find that she is nowhere to be found
- Nora: William long time side piece who like William has her own life and family outside of the affair, ends the affair out of fear it will hurt her family and then is shocked to see on the news that the man she was seeing’s family is in crisis, is forced to question if it could be William or someone else in her life who may have wanted to hurt Avery
My Review
As mentioned before I had checked out one of Shari Laplena’s other books last year and really enjoyed it which was one of the main reasons I sought out some of her other work to check out. Shari is also a fellow Canadian girly so I always love to support authors from my area. Everyone Here is Lying is similar to Not a Happy Family in that both books take you on a roller coaster through the different characters’ perspectives to try to guess what is really going on. It’s a really fun thrilling read that keeps you guessing for sure in some areas. I do think that I enjoyed Not a Happy Family a bit more only because I didn’t see as many of the twists coming in that one as I did this. Just given how some of the characters are in this book it’s a bit easier to see where is going and why, but that defiantly doesn’t take away from how enjoyable of a read it is and the fact that you still want to keep up to see if your even right on what your guessing.
I landed on giving Everyone Here is Lying a 7/10 rating. The book follows the Wooler family made up of Erin, William, and their children Michael and Avery. On the surface they seem to be a decent family who like any other family out there has their struggles but does their best to work through them. For the Wooler family, their biggest obstacle is their 9-year-old Avery. Diagnosed with a multitude of different disorders all of which make her a difficult child to raise and be around the family struggles with her dominance and anger. Erin has always been the calm rational one in the relationship, William not so much. After Nora a neighbour to the Wooler family decides that she needs to end her affair with William it sends him on a downward spiral. After getting home William finds Avery alone in their home (when she isn’t supposed to be) and after a verbal altercation hits her. It becomes clear however that this isn’t the first time. After leaving the home to cool off William finds a frenzy at his home in which it has been reported that Avery is missing, and hasn’t been seen since leaving the school. Fully aware of what went down hours before and what led to it William is forced to decide if he should be honest with the police or if he should keep the skeletons in the closet. As the days go on and Avery is still not found secrets come out from every angle and suspicions are thrown at everyone. When Erin learns of what her husband has been hiding she isn’t sure who to trust anymore, and the same goes for the police. The large question remains who took Avery, and why?
Getting into Everyone Here is Lying I wasn’t expecting it to hit on so many different topics that would bring a lot of interest to the story. The main one that I found interesting was the topic of William’s inappropriate actions and acts of punishment towards Avery, and how he views his abuse towards her. Despite his attempts to talk down on his actions that is exactly what it is, child abuse. I found it so interesting because a topic like that is just often one that doesn’t get touched on in books. Yes, we have plenty of books where characters were abused as children but I mean the act of a character abusing his child actively in the book was different. It may be something to pay attention to though if you feel like that may be a tough topic to read about. While it was tough to read these parts I felt like they were very real and raw and brought a lot of understanding into what kind of family this actually is. William was a tough character to understand for sure. It was really hard to be sympathetic to him given the fact he was cheating on his wife and hitting his child but at the same time it openly doesn’t seem like he did anything to her, but again given his track record it was hard to tell what was what. Avery was a hard character to like too, yes she is a little girl so she gets a pass in some ways but in others, it’s clear that she isn’t a good child. Now do not get me wrong at all I am not saying she deserves to be treated like that by her Dad, but at the same time, she’s a character who’s hard to be sympathetic to as well in some specific areas.
As mentioned before Everyone Here is Lying is a super-fast-paced twisty read. A lot of the twists in the book are great and I definitely didn’t see a few coming but there were a few that I did. I don’t exactly attribute that to a fault of Shari’s just more so that there weren’t any more characters to suspect other than the one, so it just wasn’t hard to break it down once it would get closer to the twists. As said though it’s just a few there are still plenty of other twists to catch you off guard. While I feel like it is a common theme in some thriller books I enjoyed how this book approached the question of what you do when you can’t trust your family in a bit of a different way than some others. There are just a lot of questions that come up as secrets get revealed and I understand why the other characters in the book start to not trust each other as much.
Has anyone else checked out Everyone Here is Lying by Shari Lapena or any of her other books? What did you think?
*** Don’t go any further if you don’t want to read any spoilers***
An aspect that I saw coming a tiny bit was that Avery was not dead. I had guessed that she was alive and given the small but arguably powerful introduction we get to her, it’s clear she isn’t the average 9-year-old. I had correctly guessed that she had run off, Shari definitely did throw me off a little bit with the whole Avery lying about having an older boyfriend thing but I still wasn’t 100% convinced of this. I just know through what I do day to day that when it comes to older men or even teens who seek out children to have romantic relationships with I am not certain Avery would be a kid they would like. She is anxious to please, but I always got the sense it was only to please herself and no one else. She’s extremely opinionated and will not go along with the opposition so I did initially think that the boyfriend thing was a lie but I wasn’t certain.
What I wasn’t expecting however was who she was with when she ran off after her Dad practically punched her. She had been making friends with a different neighbour, one that worked with her father. She had been confiding in Marion for some time about her father hitting her, and the different struggles she was having fitting in with the kids around her. When her father hit her this most recent time she went to Marion with a plan. She wanted her father to suffer. The plan was she would stay with Marion for a few days to get everyone worrying, and looking at her father. She wanted to embarrass him essentially because she knew that he wouldn’t be able to outrun his missing daughter and the way he was treating her. What she didn’t anticipate however is that Marion was cooking up her own plan. I guess she was in love with William and knew that he had been cheating on Erin with Nora. Out of jealousy, she wanted to find a way to hurt both William and Nora. I guess for it not being her. When Avery came over with her plan it was perfect. Marion called in the tip saying that she saw Nora’s son pick up Avery in his car. She was going to kill Avery and then plant the evidence on Nora’s family. I mean it was a crazy plan but clearly, she’s a crazy lady.
I was convinced that Marion was going to kill Avery but upon reflecting on that now that’s a bit much so it was a bit obvious it was never going to happen. Avery figures out that Marion is going to kill her and beats her to it. With that, she can create this story in which Marion kidnaps her due to being in love with her father and her jealousy over him not choosing her as his mistress. Marion planned to frame both families in revenge. Avery claimed she was drugged most of the time despite having free reign in the basement of Marion’s house.
I was honestly a bit pissed that Avery was going to get away with everything so I honestly really did enjoy the ending where Avery goes on TV in hopes of telling this fake story and finding fame and trips up and admits that she was working with Marion. It was just a funny ending and I just tried to imagine a 9-year-old being caught in some kidnapping conspiracy on live TV. I thought it was well deserved given everything she had done, but I still did feel bad for how William was towards her.
It was a super twisty ending with a few things I did see coming and some I definitely didn’t. I hope you enjoyed this review! Thank you for checking this review out! Feel free to follow me on my socials @baddiebookreviews to be kept up to date for when I release a new review!
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