 | |
| Author | Justine Larbalestier |
|---|---|
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Teen Fiction |
| Publisher | Allen & Unwin (Australia) Bloomsbury Press (US) |
Publication date | 2009 |
Liar is a 2009 young adult thriller novel by Justine Larbalestier. It is written in first person from the point of view of Micah Wilkins, who introduces herself to the reader as an unreliable narrator. [1]
The protagonist of the novel, Micah Wilkins, is a seventeen-year-old biracial girl living in New York with her parents. When the novel opens, Micah's boyfriend Zachary, who's been missing, is found dead. The story is told in segments of past and present, moving between Micah's family history and how she met her boyfriend, and with the present as the investigation into Zach's death unfolds.
The concept of the story is that Micah is a compulsive liar. The novel is written as though Micah is writing the words, so she is aware of and refers to the audience in the text, to whom she is telling the story. In the opening she promises to tell the whole truth, but as the story continues she retracts or "corrects" statements she'd said before, claiming the new truth to be the real one.
Liar became the focus of Internet-centered controversy when the cover of its advance reading copy (ARC) featured a young white woman with long, straight hair, while the book describes its protagonist as an African American girl with "nappy" hair. Larbalestier was among those critical of this, saying "the problem is longstanding and industry-wide. Whitewashing of covers, ghettoizing of books by people of color, and low expectations (reflected in the lack of marketing push behind the majority of these books) are not new things". [2] The cover was changed for the mass market edition. [3]
A first-person narrative is a mode of storytelling in which a storyteller recounts events from that storyteller's own personal point of view, using first-person grammar such as "I", "me", "my", and "myself". It must be narrated by a first-person character, such as a protagonist, re-teller, witness, or peripheral character. Alternatively, in a visual storytelling medium, the first-person perspective is a graphical perspective rendered through a character's visual field, so the camera is "seeing" out of a character's eyes.
An unreliable narrator is a narrator whose credibility is compromised. They can be found in fiction and film, and range from children to mature characters. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. While unreliable narrators are almost by definition first-person narrators, arguments have been made for the existence of unreliable second- and third-person narrators, especially within the context of film and television, and sometimes also in literature.
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Justine Larbalestier is an Australian writer of young adult fiction best known for her 2009 novel, Liar.
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Young adult fiction and children's literature in general have historically shown a lack of diversity, that is, a lack of books with a main character who is, for example, a person of color, from the LGBTQIA+ community, or disabled. The numbers of children's book authors have shown a similar lack of diversity. Diversity is considered beneficial since it encourages children of diverse backgrounds to read and it teaches children of all backgrounds an accurate view of the world around them. In the mid-2010s, more attention was drawn to this problem from various quarters. In the several years following, diversity numbers seem to have improved: One survey showed that in 2017, a quarter of children's books were about minority protagonists, almost a 10 percent increase from 2016.
There are several ways to let readers know your narrator has credibility issues. You can tell them up front that the narrator is a liar, as Justine Larbalestier does on page 1 of Liar [...]
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