Book Review: None of This is True by Lisa Jewell

For someone who enjoys reading thrillers as much as I do, some may be surprised to hear this is my first Lisa Jewell book. She’s a mega author in the UK having written 21 books and selling over 10 million copies worldwide, so I thought this would be the perfect book to bring on a beach vacation I went on a few weeks ago (hence the beach photo above). I was surprised at how dark None of This is True was, and although it definitely had me spinning theories as I read it, I wasn’t exactly blown away by it because it felt very similar to the other domestic thrillers I had been reading as of late. Perhaps this is why she’s such a popular author? The appetite for these novels don’t seem to be dying down anytime soon, and half the fun is trying out ‘new to me’ authors to find the perfect fit.

Plot Summary

Written as if the reader is viewing a true-crime documentary on Netflix, the story revolves around two women; Alix Summers, a beautiful and popular podcaster with two young kids and a wealthy husband, and Josie Fair, an odd woman married to a much older man with two older kids of her own. Josie meets Alix at a restaurant as it is both their birthday, and they discover they are birthday ‘twins’, having been born on the same day in the same hospital. Josie then tries to artificially insert herself into Alix’s orbit, suggesting she do a podcast based on Josie’s plan to make some major changes in her life. Intrigued, Alix agrees, but then Josie’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, and the more she gets to know Josie and her odd family situation, the more Alix regrets inviting Josie into her life. And although Alix’s life may seem perfect on the outside, we learn that her husband has a bad habit of going out drinking with his buddies and getting blackout drunk, not returning home for a few days at at a time. Once Josie learns of this, she admonishes him openly, encouraging Alix to leave him because she deserves better. Short interviews are interspersed as documentary elements, along with a few first-person perspective chapters from Josie and Alix, so as readers we are let in on alot, but it wouldn’t be a suspense without some twists along the way…

My Thoughts

The majority of the action takes place over a month and a half in the summer of 2019, and almost immediately, the feeling of discomfort is the overwhelming emotion I felt while reading this book. Jewell does this on purpose as she chooses topics that are typically considered taboo: incest and pedophilia. When the two women meet, we quickly learn Josie is married to a man thirty years her senior, beginning their relationship when she was only 15 years old. They have two daughters together, and we learn that one of those daughters still lives at home, never leaves her room, but the father goes into her room every night once Josie has gone to bed. Of course the alarm bells are ringing, and now Josie is deemed a monster, because why hasn’t she stepped in to stop this? Along with Alix, the reader is swayed into different opinions on who is to blame when this husband is confronted, but then we remember that the book is called None of This is True, so then what?

The tension of the book continues to build as we hear from outside sources during their interviews, and its hinted that a terrible thing occurs which ends up with the death of more than one person. Even though the story takes place in the bright and light summer, it has a suffocating atmosphere, which only gets worse when Josie moves into Alix’s house with seemingly no intention of leaving. Alix feels unmoored as she dives deeper into Josie’s life, and as a reader, I felt the same way, eager to return to my normal life to escape the complications of these women. And Jewell intentionally wants readers to feel this way, especially considering the title of the book, because it’s preparing us for some major twists or lies to be revealed, so we are constantly on edge. It’s a brilliant move on the part of the author, but it’s almost too effective, because I felt like I was entering a dark place every time I picked it up.

Well written, plotted and paced, there isn’t any one thing I can point to in this book that I didn’t like. And yet, I have a hard time recommending it, simply because it reminds me of so many other books with unreliable female narrators.