None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell

 

And again we have a novel where the best thing about it is the title. The text itself has more or less no charms, what with flat and lifeless and barely-differentiated characters; jumbled nonlinearity and cluttered multiple POVs (who all seem to be varying shades of unreliable, which makes it really hard to believe a single word on the page, which is probably the novel's single biggest problem); and a basic completely linear plot line that's basically "watch the bad person do the bad things" with approximately zero narrative tension. The prose is tepid in that "because you are neither hot nor cold I shall spew you from my mouth" kinda way. I guess it's about as good to find a novelist I can avoid as one I can look for, right? I'll just keep telling myself that, I guess.