The Lie Tree Review

This week's novel is The Lie Tree, dark YA fantasy by Frances Hardinge.  Again, this was recommended by NPR's best books of 2016, and that list is on a roll.

To escape the scandal of Faith's natural scientist father having faked his fossil discoveries, the family moves to the tiny island of Vane for her father to help with an excavation there.  When her father is murdered, Faith finds that he had discovered a Lie Tree, which grows on lies and produces fruit that reveals the truth when eaten.  Faith's lies spread through Vane so she can learn the truth of her father's death from the tree.

Faith's character is beautifully done.  Her parents forbid her to go to school, even though she's fascinated with natural science and an avid student.  They keep things from her and never confide in her because she's a girl.  So she eavesdrops and snoops to exert some control over her life and get the information she needs to navigate her life.  This character flaw, or character trait, flows naturally from her situation, and it's presented with equal parts guilt, excitement, and compulsion.  And through all her sneaking and spying, all the lies she tells her parents and her parents' friends about being stupider than she actually is to keep up appearances, it's natural that she takes to the lie tree.  The tree grows bigger and faster for her than it ever did for her father.

There's an ease to her lies that make them elegant.  People more easily believe a lie that they want to believe, so Faith plants half lies and gets other people to create and spread the lies for her, so they never point back to her.  One lie feeds on another, so if the townsfolk believe one, they'll believe the next.

Then after a book full of Faith resenting her mother's vapidness and the other society women's coldness or denseness, she comes to the realization that other women are acting the part of demure, vain, ignorant women.  She never noticed that she wasn't alone because they all did such a good job.  They all hide in plain sight just as she does.

"Faith had always told herself that she was not like other ladies.  But neither, it seemed, were other ladies."

Oh heck yes!  This is so important, and I love it so much.  The concept of "not like other girls" drives me up a wall, because it starts with the assumptions that 1. girls are a homogeneous group and 2. being a girl is a bad thing.  And what is especially great about this revelation in The Lie Tree is that the novel doesn't start by saying, "Faith wasn't like other girls."  It starts by showing how downtrodden she feels and how hard she works to act a "proper lady," which are completely relatable problems that demonize the patriarchy (and those that propagate it) rather than demonizing women. 

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Next week: Sleeping Giants, epistolary sci-fi by Sylvain Neuvel.