How We Learned to Lie by Meredith Miller (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- How We Learned to Lie by Meredith Miller
Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-247428-5 $17.99
E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-06-247430-8 $8.99
Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12
Joan Harris and Anthony (Daisy) McNamara have been two halves of a whole most of their lives; 1979 becomes a momentous year, though, as they turn sixteen [End Page 479] and the seams of their worlds, always threatening to fray, begin to seriously come apart. Daisy’s mother, floating in a pill-and-alcohol haze since his father’s imprisonment, finally leaves for good, and his drug-dealing brother also disappears. Joan’s newly developed body attracts unwanted attention from a sleazy police officer and welcome attention, at least at first, from her teacher. Each desiring to protect the other, Daisy and Joan start to keep secrets about what’s really happening in their lives. Some of the secrets have high stakes—higher for Joan and her brothers since they are black, while Daisy is white, another difference between the two friends that has started to openly matter to both their families as they think about the future. Although there is plenty of action here, this is not a quick read; the leisurely pace and lyrical prose of this poignant literary novel invite readers to drift in the wake of the losses Joan and Daisy are just realizing—lost naïveté about the future, lost ease with each other, lost oblivion to the way the choices of others impinge upon their own lives. Plot points, some grisly, do double duty as metaphors for the unwelcome transition into adulthood; though specific in time and place, the attendant losses will be intimately recognizable on a profound level by sensitive readers.
