Review: The Weight of Lies

The Weight of Lies by Emily Carpenter
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Lies must weigh a lot because this novel sure was dense. It felt like it went on and on.. and on…. And then on some more. It took a full week for me to get through it, which I think is a new Audible record for me. There’s quite a bit going on within the walls of this book - some of it is good - but more of it is superfluous and twisty for the sake of being twisty, with a cast of characters that are inconsistent, annoying and generally unrelatable.

However, my main criticism isn’t with the novel itself, but rather the novel within the novel, since this one went all Inception “dream within a dream” on us. The uber popular, bestselling cult classic (isn’t that a bit of an oxymoron..?) novel “Kitten” was just plain bad. And we are lucky enough to learn this firsthand as random experts of this literary masterpiece are woven in between chapters of the main storyline. This plot device didn’t quite work as well as it should have, both because these scenes added next to nothing to the overall story, and, need I remind you, it simply wasn't good.

Much like the loyal following of weirdly obsessive conspiracy theorists / junior detectives dubbed “The Kitty Cult” (sadly this part seems believable), I have figured out what went wrong with this Emily Carpenter novel - she tried to do too much with what was already an intriguing and unique premise on it's own. In the end, what we have here is a classic case of promising concept, poor execution.

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