Title:  What I Saw and How I Lied

Author:  Judy Blundell

Winner, 2008 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature; an ALA Best Book for Young Adults

Ratings Explanation

Language:  All of the usual swear words; one profanity (Christ).  Some overt sexual references (“whore”, “screwing”).

Violence:  Evie’s stepfather Joe throws a punch at Peter.  Evie’s parents fight and a vase gets broken.  Evie’s mother throws an ashtray in her direction, the glass shatters and cuts Evie’s face.

Sexual Content:  Evie’s mother Bev became pregnant at 17 and had to marry the father, who quickly leaves town. Rumor has it that Bev was unfaithful to Evie’s stepfather Joe while he was away at war.  Evie and Peter French kiss, and he teaches her what to do.  Their bodies are entwined while they kiss and she yearns for more. There is pushing and thrusting. Evie also kisses Wally, the hotel bellhop, just to satisfy her curiosity about “what happens after the kiss”; a rather vivid and explicit description of Wally going too far. Evie makes him stop.

Adult Themes:  Evie’s mother and most of the adults smoke.  Evie and her friend think it looks glamorous and pretend to smoke using chocolate cigarettes.  Evie drinks champagne at a dinner party.  Strong anti-Semitism in south Florida.  A Jewish couple is disgraced and kicked out of the hotel.  Joe and Peter steal confiscated Jewish valuables from an army warehouse in Austria.  Evie’s mother has an affair with Peter Coleridge.  Peter is presumably swept overboard while out at sea with her parents and they are put on trial for his death; Evie lies under oath at the trial.

Synopsis

In this coming-of-age suspense novel, 15-year-old Evie suffers the growing pains of first love and parental betrayal.  It is 1947 and Evie’s stepfather Joe has just returned from World War II.  The family travels to Palm Beach, Florida on vacation where they meet Tom and Arlene Grayson, a Jewish couple from New York staying in the same hotel. Tom and Joe enter into a shady business deal together.  Meanwhile a former army acquaintance of Joe’s mysteriously shows up and Evie is immediately smitten.  She falls inlove with the older Peter Coleridge against her parents’ wishes, and Evie soon discovers that he is harboring a terrible secret from the war involving her father.  But that isn’t his only secret: even while flirting with Evie he is having a clandestine affair with her bombshell mother, Bev.  Evie refuses to believe it; her disbelief blinds her and ruins her once-close relationship with her mother.  Anti-Semitism runs thick in Palm Beach and when the Graysons are found out, they are cruelly thrown out of town.   Everything comes to a head as Joe, Bev, and Peter head out on a boat just before a hurricane hits the coast, but only Joe and Bev return.  What Evie will discover as she sorts through her grief is the realization that the world can be cruel and the truth painful, that her parents are not perfect or even what they seem, and that your first love can be life-changing.

I have mixed emotions about this book.  Its film-noir style of intrigue and first love make for a page-turning story.  Ms. Blundell details well WWII incidents, anti-Semitism, and post-war life in America.  However, I was disappointed with the blunt sexuality and Evie’s desire to experiment with it; those scenes were far too descriptive for a book aimed at young teens (the publisher cites “grades 8-12”). I find it dismaying that this book was featured in my 5th grader’s Scholastic book order.  Upper high school and older.