Customer Reviews

Beautiful Lies (Lib)(CD)

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(35)
3 star:		(22)
2 star:		(23)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

I had such high hopes. This book had starred reviews which were apparently (forgive me) "beautiful lies." I enjoy a good thriller, even if it isn't high art. But this isn't thrilling. It's slow. And the writing is belabored. Lisa Unger, the author, can't let a noun go by without attaching three or four adjectives or descriptive dependent clauses. People don't just sit on a couch. They walk across the warped, green, linoleum floor and bend their creaking knees to lower themselves, tiredly, to the velvet red couch bought second-hand on a street corner in Williamsburg on a rainy Thursday when no one wanted to be up but the sun was too bright to do otherwise. See what I'm saying? The main character enters a cheap pizza joint and the story stops for an entire page while we read all about the paneling, the floors, every person sitting in the place, and the posture of the proprietress. In other hands, maybe this would be interesting, but here it is like you're trapped in a conversation where the other person REFUSES TO GET TO THE POINT. Maddening. Do not waste your time.

WOW!!! I predict a wonderful future for Lisa Unger's first novel, "Beautiful Lies." I forecast its presence on the NY Times Bestseller List for many a moon. However, unlike a number of successful bestselling novels, this one is well written. It also has a most original plot and a quirky, three dimensional protagonist, as well as realistic minor characters. And, oddly enough, there are no real villains in a story where bad things certainly happen. In the novel her main character, Ridley Jones, says/thinks "there are no heroes or villains in real life, 'only good and bad choices.'

Our gal Ridley is a thirty-something freelance writer who does work for Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, etc., so she is pretty successful. But rents are high in New York City and even successful freelancers are hard pressed at times to come up with the rent. Ridley does not have this problem. She inherited a healthy sum of money from her uncle, "who wasn't actually an uncle," but her father's best friend. He absolutely adored her. This money cushions her against potential poverty and allows her freedom from financial worries. And "freedom" is a concept of immense importance to her.

Ridley's "fairly uneventful life" is turned upside down one morning...the morning she gains a bit more than her share of 15 minutes of fame. She sees a toddler about to be hit by a speeding truck and leaps into the street to save the boy. Fortuitously...or not, a photographer is on the scene and Ridley, in full action, appears on the cover of the local papers. The story is picked up by the morning talk shows where she and her family bask in the glory of her brief but bright spotlight. They have no idea what her moment of fame will bring her...like an envelope in the mail containing a note and an old photograph. The faded photo is of a young woman - who could be Ridley's double, a man and a little girl who resembles Ridley Jones as a little girl. The note includes a phone number and the question, "Are you my daughter?"

Unhinged, our heroine seeks reassurance from her doting father, a successful pediatrician, and her mother, a controlling, uptight woman. They slough off the incident and tell her that some wacko is having a joke at her expense, insisting that they are her birth parents. Still uncertain, she looks for her older brother, a drug addict who lives on he streets, and when she finds him he makes some disturbing comments which fuel her confusion.

Then she meets her handsome and mysterious new neighbor, Jake, a sculptor and a real hottie. Her life will never be the same.

Set in Manhattan's East Village, just a few blocks from where I live, Ms. Unger really brings the neighborhood to life with her wonderful descriptive writing. "Beautiful Lies," a taut psychological thriller is 375 pages long and I read it in 2 sittings. It is truly UNPUTDOWNABLE!!! I can't recommend a book more highly than that!
JANA

I truly enjoyed this book. It wasn't necessarily about the story, although I was riveted, and compelled to turn pages to learn the outcome. Plain and simple, it was about the writing. Lisa Unger's style is refreshing and original. I felt like she, through the voice of her protagonist, was in the room with me, telling me this story.

Beautiful Lies is a first-person account of a young woman named Ridley Jones, who contemplates a single act, and the events leading up to this act, that change her life forever. She became a momentary celebrity after saving a child from being hit by a car. Because her heroic and selfless deed was inadvertently videotaped, the world witnessed it on local and even national television, and her exposure enabled the truth of her identity to be exposed as well.

Throughout the tale, Unger/Jones "talks" to her reader. "I know what you're thinking," she often writes. At first I found this a little annoying, but ultimately, I had to admit in each case, she did know what I was thinking. She had me that hooked. Throughout the story, she interjects little gems of wisdom regarding family dynamics where her parents and brother (her biological parents and biological brother???) are concerned, which had me nodding my head and saying "yes!" One of my favorite lines in the book is: "It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present." Ultimately, the mysteries are revealed and all the characters--particularly the parents, the mysterious uncle, drug-addict brother, sexy man upstairs, ex-boyfriend and his mother, and the mob-linked laywer--are relevant and satisfying.

This is a great, fast read and I recommend it for readers who appreciate good story telling and down to earth characters.

Michele Cozzens, Author of A Line Between Friends and The Things I Wish I'd Said.

I liked Lisa Unger's Fragile: A Novel, so I decided to check out her first novel, Beautiful Lies. Gosh, what a disappointment! The main character of this novel is the most immature, self-centered and annoying thirty-something you could ever imagine. You'd be hard pressed to find a 12-year-old as immature and bratty as Ridley.

Ridley calls herself a writer, even though she never really writes anything. She never had to work for a living and has always been pampered by her relatives. This privileged life bores her and she decides to entertain herself with a touch of drama. The entire novel is about Ridley running from one man to another (her father, her brother, her former boyfriend, her new boyfriend), trying to get them to make her feel "safe" and "comforted." When the safety and comfort they provide is not up to her standards, she runs out dramatically and rushes to the next man in line.

This character is the biggest drama queen you can imagine. Every trivial little emotion she experiences or thinks she experiences gets analyzed to death. She blows every tiny little thing completely out of proportion and obsesses over it endlessly. I lost count of how many times she "almost" had a nervous breakdown for absolutely no reason. To give just one example of her drama queen skills, when her boyfriend asks her whether she prefers to call the person she is curious about on the phone or would she like him to go take a look at their house first, Ridley compares this choice with having to choose the method to kill yourself.

Ridley regularly breaks into endless quasi-philosophical monologues filled with the most mind-numbing platitudes you can imagine. Equally annoying is her tendency to address the readers directly to tell them what she knows they must be thinking right now and why they are wrong in thinking it. The so-called mystery in this novel is pretty much non-existent. Anybody who is a little bit less of a drama queen than Ridley could have solved it in 15 minutes.

In short, unless you like reading about spoiled rich drama queens, don't waste time or money on this book. I got the Kindle version for 78 cents, but I would have been pretty annoyed if I had to pay the full price for it.

If there's anything better than discoving a really great first-time author, I don't know what it is. I LOVED Beautiful Lies. Basically, once I'd picked up the book, I just couldn't put it down until I'd finished it.

The protagonist, Ridley, was so real. She told her story in the first person and addressed the reader directly. I swear, I could be friends with her.

And the story she had to tell... It started so plausably and got so convoluted. But I was with her every step of the way. Unger made me buy a fairly far-fetched plot. But mostly, I just wanted to know what was going to happen. What HAD already happened to this girl.

Here's how it begins: Ridley Jones is a successful freelance journalist in NY. She's a happy person with a loving family and a good life. One day a random act of heroism gets her photo splashed across the news for a week. In the wake of her brief celebrity, she receives a photograph in the mail. It's a photo of man she's never seen, a woman who bares a striking resemblance to her, and a two-year old girl who looks like she did as a baby--though she's never seen a photo of herself that young. The accompanying note says, "I think you're my daughter." Ridley is not adopted.

The story aqccelerates at a break-neck pace from there. But aside from great characters, and a strong plot, this is an exceptionally well-written thriller. It's being billed as a "literary thriller," and I don't know that I'd go that far, but this novel is way above average.

I can't wait to see what Lisa Unger writes next. I hope she writes fast!

I read this novel in only 2 days, could not put it down because I wanted to find out what was going to happen. A woman gets "15 minutes of fame" through rescuing a little boy, and then out of the blue receives a package indicating that the people she thought were her parents might not actually be her parents. And when she tried to uncover where the package might have come from, she finds out some information that certain people do not want anyone to know about (and puts herself in possible danger by doing so). I had my suspicions about how the story would wrap up early on... but, not to give anything away, there were too many things that did not quite seem to make sense when I reached the end. NOT because I am too stupid to figure them out. Some things regarding who the father actually is (when you find out, you may have the same question... see my post in the forum below after you've read it), and the so-called shady connections of the lawyer in the story seemed kind of, well... let's just say that it seemed awfully contrived just to make the plot "thicker" and to throw the reader off the scent, and not something that might have realistically happened. And, there were some other items that were intentionally never really resolved at the end - you want to know WHY things happened, and the author either to be quirky or because she can't think of a reason herself (seems almost like she was under a deadline to get the book done and couldn't pull it all together adequately in time) gyps you out of a resolution after you spend your valuable time reading the whole thing.

Had I read the reviews here before getting this audio, I would have skipped it! Unfortunately, I was stuck on a long car ride with only this book to listen to. It was pretty dreadful. Too long, overwritten, unlikable characters, silly situations, predictable scenarios, repetitive, awkward. Wasn't there an editor involved in this mess? I cannot believe this was a bestseller and a BookSense book!

All of the "mob" stuff was just not at all believable, nor were many of the "action scenes". The flimsy-at-best premise of the book was not strong enough to carry all of the weight that the author attached to it.

Ridley Jones is content with her life. "I have loved and been loved by my parents...I love my work, my friends, the place I live," she muses at the opening of BEAUTIFUL LIES. Happy with her East Village apartment, surrounded by a loving family, Ridley's only real trouble is her wayward older brother Ace, a drug addict who has been cut off from the rest of the family and who regularly disappears into the underbelly of Manhattan, reappearing only when he needs Ridley to give him money.

All of Ridley's assumptions about her comfortable life evaporate in a second, though, when she achieves her 15 minutes of fame after saving the life of a small child. Instantly, her name and photo are plastered all over the city, even throughout the country. Ridley enjoys her brief fame, until she receives an alarming letter from someone claiming she's his daughter. When Ridley later receives a 1970s newspaper clipping featuring a photo of a murdered woman who looks just like Ridley herself, she isn't sure whom to believe.

Ridley's questions to her parents are met with secrecy and defensiveness. Is it possible that Ridley's entire existence has been nothing but a series of beautiful lies? Soon enough, she is thrust into a full-blown mystery that may involve her whole family, her ex-fiance, and even the sexy new upstairs neighbor. On the run, unsure of whom she can trust, Ridley must use all her resources to delve into a past she never knew or even imagined.

Readers will devour Lisa Unger's terrific debut work of fiction. An emotionally charged suspense novel with a likable heroine, this sexy thriller rockets like a racecar through the streets of Manhattan. New York City is actually a vibrant character in its own right, which uses real neighborhood locales to enhance its air of authenticity. The narrative's tone, with its second-person addresses to the reader and some philosophical musings that occasionally interrupt the action, may seem intrusive to some readers. The combination of truly enthralling plotting and emotional self-discovery, though, will draw in even the most reluctant readers, who certainly will label Unger as a new suspense author to watch.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

I thought I would love this book. I eagerly awaited its arrival from my book club. I was so disappointed. The premise seemed so promising but instead, I found the book predictable and unbelievable at times. The strangest feeling I had was that I didn't like ANY of the characters and that's a first for me. I didn't care if any of them were in danger. None of them were likable -- especially the heroine and her hunky boyfriend. I had to force myself to finish the book hoping the whole time that it would get better. This is coming from someone who adores a good novel full of mystery and intrigue.

Simply ridiculous. Ridley's reactions to the secrets that are exposed are contrived and unbelievable. How did this book get so many 5 star reviews? I imagine its fans also loved the Twilight books...