REVIEW: Count My Lies by Sophie Stava

JennieB- Reviews / Book ReviewsSuspense / thriller6 Comments

Sloane Caraway is a liar.

Harmless lies, mostly, to make her self-proclaimed sad, little life a bit more interesting.

So when Sloane sees a young girl in tears at a park one afternoon, she can’t help herself—she tells the girl’s (very attractive) dad she’s a nurse and helps him pull a bee stinger from the girl’s foot.

With this lie, and chance encounter, Sloane becomes the nanny for the wealthy, and privileged Jay and Violet Lockhart. The perfect New York couple, with a brownstone, a daughter in private school, and summers on Block Island.

But maybe Sloane isn’t the only one lying, and all that’s picture-perfect harbors a much more dangerous truth. To say anything more is to spoil the most exciting, twisty, and bitingly smart suspense novel to come out in years.

The thing about lies is that they add up, form their own truth and a twisted prison of a world. And in Count My Lies, Sophie Stava spins a breakneck, unputdownable thriller about the secrets we keep, and the terrifying dangers that lurk just under the images we spend so much time trying to maintain.

This is apparently a GMA Book Club pick, and I can see why. It has a vague Gone-Girl-esque feel to it; not so much in specific plot points but in a vibe and the way that the book is divided into different POVs.

Sloane Caraway, as noted in the blurb, lies. A lot. I didn’t think that would bother me, but I was wrong. The impulsive (and honestly compulsive) nature of Sloane’s lies ended up making me anxious. I understood that her life was boring and drab and she felt compelled to make it somehow seem more interesting, but it was like watching someone walking a tightrope over a deep canyon.

As Sloane’s backstory is revealed, it becomes clear that she’s repeating history with Jay and Violet; her previous situation ended in a restraining order against Sloane. I became frustrated with her, or perhaps more specifically by her repeated insistence that this situation was different. I don’t do well with delusional people. Also, a note on her lying: in my limited experience with compulsive liars, I will say that people absolutely know that you’re lying. Which adds a whole extra layer of cringe to the situation.

So, Sloane falls into the nannying job for Jay and Violet and is able to quit her manicurist job (she’d previously had a position at a Montessori preschool, but that ended in a spectacular flameout). She is first drawn to Jay, who seems like the perfect man – breathtakingly handsome, rich, an attentive husband and father. But when she starts working for Violet and Jay, she doesn’t see much of him (he works a lot), and so she is instead drawn (more platonically) to the charming and also-seemingly-perfect-but-somehow-more-accessible Violet. Violet and Sloane (oh, wait, she’s told them her name is Caitlin, an impulsive lie that seems dumb at the time but does end up making her harder to trace) become friends – it seems like Sloane Caitlin spends more time with Violet than with her adorable daughter Harper.

I can’t talk about the second half of the book without revealing huge spoilers. When the POV changed I actually liked it because it was nice to get a break from Sloane (I’m just going to call her Sloane rather than Caitlin because that after all is her name, even if she is called Caitlin through much of the book). As mentioned, she made me anxious. And while the facts revealed in the shifted perspective weren’t exactly surprising – the blurb says more than it should, maybe – I was surprised by how much is revealed far before the end. There were still some aspects that weren’t entirely clear, and of course the end has a couple of twists, but again, the structure was very Gone-Girl-esque to me. Which isn’t a bad thing – I can’t be the only current suspense reader for whom GG was a gateway drug.

So far, pretty good. But about those twists at the end – one of them made sense even though I didn’t entirely anticipate it. But the other…

I talk pretty often in my suspense reviews about “batshit” twists and plot points that don’t bear close scrutiny. By and large, I accept such things if the book keeps my attention well enough. This book did, and so I accepted the fact that the machinations of one character, while often clever, also depended on a lot of little things falling their way: people showing up or not showing up when expected to, people acting and reacting in specific ways, etc. That’s all fine. But the actual end of this book featured some elements that were just too far-fetched to be acceptable. Like, my limit was reached. This could not possibly have played out this way in the real world or anything approaching the real world.

And so it kind of…ruined the book for me? Ruined is too strong of a word, but it definitely overshadowed the rest of the story. All I keep thinking about is how unbelievable it was.

I will spoil it for the curious below (warning: spoiler is vague but also not that vague?):

If a book is dumb and has dumb plot twists, I probably judge it less harshly. But Count My Lies wasn’t a dumb book, until the unbelievable ending, and that annoys me.

I’m not sure what to rate this one. It would have been a B+ before the end, and initially I dropped it down to a B, but I think the ending was so stupid I’ll go with a B-. I would still try the author again, though.

Best,

Jennie

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