Chamberlain: Website • Facebook • TwitterFormat: eBook, 35 pages
Source: NetGalley
Release Date: June 4, 2013
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Genre: Contemporary
Age Group: Young Adult
Get It: Amazon • Barnes & Noble
An e-original short story that sets the stage for bestselling author Diane Chamberlain’s upcoming novel Necessary Lies (September 2013).~synopsis provided by Goodreads
The First Lie gives readers an early glimpse into the life of thirteen-year-old Ivy Hart. It’s 1958 in rural North Carolina, where Ivy lives with her grandmother and sister on a tobacco farm. As tenant farmers, Ivy and her family don’t have much freedom, though she and her best friend, Henry, often sneak away in search of adventure…and their truest selves. But life on the farm takes a turn when Ivy’s teenage sister gives birth—all the while maintaining her silence about the baby’s father. Soon Ivy finds herself navigating the space between adolescence and adulthood as she tries to unravel a dark web of family secrets and make sense of her ever-evolving life in the segregated South.
I leaned my bike against our lopsided porch and tiptoes up the steps, still real shaky from the last few hours.What an amazing introduction to Necessary Lies! Despite being only 35 pages long, Chamberlain did an amazing job of pulling you into this world and not letting go. This book is nothing but a tease! And I mean that in a good way.
Ivy comes home after sneaking out with her friend Henry, they had been playing with a Oujia board in the church, to her sister screaming for their mother. A lost cause as she is "locked up with the other crazy people at Dix Hospital."
Ivy is an amazing narrator, despite being 13 years of age. She goes into detail and we really feel her confusion when the adults tell her she must call the social worker and not the nurse they have been working with. (I myself was a bit lost over the reasoning to this... at first.) However, she does what she is told and eventually Mary Ella is driven to the hospital by Eli - another tenant and worker on the farm Ivy and her family live on. It is also speculated that Eli is possibly the father of Mary Ella's baby, which is a huge scandal as Mary Ella is white and Eli is black. Keep in mind, we are somewhere rural in 1958.
By the end of the novella, Ivy has committed herself to helping out her grandmother and her sister with the new addition to their family. I love that a 13-year-old is ready and willing to do such a thing for her family.
This short introduction to Ivy's world is the right amount of story to leave you begging and asking for me. I am curious to find out where this family is going to be headed, what's going to happen, and what more lies are going to be told - because if it's anything like in The First Lie, it's going to be good. I'm excited to see Ivy step up into the role she is placing herself in and how drastically these lives are going to change over the course of Necessary Lies.
