The central plot of The Truth and Lies of Ella Black is a great one – Ella is a teenage girl on the edge of adulthood, and as well as having unaccountable, uncontrollable rages and destructive emotions, she also has a secret past about which she knows nothing. Her parents, with the knowledge of what that past is, take her – suddenly and inexplicably – out of school and away to Rio. The big questions are: what is wrong with Ella, and why was it so important that her parents get her far away from her comfortable life in England so quickly? The answers to these questions are revealed slowly, and amidst the dramas of her late teenage life a darkness unfolds; a darkness with roots in very disturbing events from long, long ago.
What didn’t resonate with me was the rich, spoiled, apathetic protagonist, who is written a little too inconsistently, often acting, thinking, and behaving more like a child than a young adult. I also blanched at the contrived nature of many of the plot twists and turns: whilst the main thread (which I won’t spoil by revealing) is fairly solid and shocking, there is also a lot of contrived wish-fulfilment going on – a bit too much luck falls into Ella’s lap at key moments, so that any miss-steps she takes are caught and fixed without her lifting a finger or having to grow and change and take responsibility.
The Truth and Lies of Ella Black was a bit of a ‘miss’ for me. Taken at face value it is a fun, pacey and intriguing novel that carries the reader to a satisfying conclusion, so I think many readers will enjoy it as a fairly light read – me included! But there is little to really make us think, and little insight into any of the characters beyond the observation that an injection of (sometimes stolen) cash will help us overcome most of life’s hurdles.
Publish Date: 12 October 2017. Publisher: Penguin
I received a review copy of The Truth and Lies of Ella Black from the publisher via NetGalley.
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