What I Saw and How I Lied

I’ve always wanted to read Judy Blundell’s What I Saw and How I Lied, not just because it won the (US) National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2008, but also because I was familiar with the author’s work.

Writing as Jude Watson, she penned Beyond the Grave (#4), In Too Deep (#6), and part of Vespers Rising (#11). I always appreciated how she brought out a more personal side to Dan and Amy — and even the baddies! — and I was eager to read her most notable work.

What I Saw and How I Lied is a coming of age story set post-WWII, in the late 40’s. The story is told from the point of view of 15-year old Evelyn “Evie” Spooner, who is dealing with puberty, boys, and living in the post-war era.

Evie thinks the world of her stepfather, Joe, who is the father she has wanted all her life. Home from the war and now operating a booming appliance store in Queens, Joe springs another lovely surprise on Evie and her mother: a vacation in Palm Beach, Florida.

The small family hits the road, but the trip doesn’t turn out to be what any of them expect. Florida is unbelievably hot, and it turns out Palm Beach is a ghost town in the fall. Nevertheless, Evie’s family checks in the Le Mirage Hotel to make the most of their vacation.

In town, Evie meets Peter Coleridge, a handsome and charming young man who turns out to have been an ex-GI who was with Joe in post-war Austria. Joe makes it clear he dislikes Peter’s company, but the simmering tension sails past Evie, who is enthralled with Peter and grabs every opportunity to spend time with him.

A tragedy occurs, shattering the Palm Beach idyll. Evie finds herself ensnared in a tangled web of lies and deceit. To get at the truth, Evie must sort out what she knows about the parents who raised her and the guy she loves, and choose whose side she’s on.

I read a lot of historical YA, and there’s a lot set in World War II, but not a lot of post-war novels. In fact the only one I remember reading is Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J. Freedman as herself, and it’s strikingly similar to What I Saw and How I Lied — Sally’s family also moves to Florida, and the main themes are racism and anti-Semitism, which Blundell also tackles.

The voice is amazingly sincere (and extremely readable!), and from the first page, I really felt that Evie was speaking to me. I particularly liked the heady descriptions of post-war America — it was as if I was stepping into the page and seeing everything (in my mind) in Technicolor, with Sinatra playing in the background:

“That afternoon, my best friend Margie Crotty and I stopped at the candy store for chocolate cigarettes to practice smoking. Cigarettes were rationed during the war, like everything else, but now there were stacks of packs, Lucky Strikes and Old Golds and Camels. And Chesterfields, so smooth they soothed your throat. That was what advertisements said.

“Margie and I believed in magazines and movies more than church. We knew that if we practiced hard enough, one day we’d smoke a real cigarette with Revlon matching lips and fingertips while Frank Sinatra sang ‘All or Nothing at All’ right at us.

It was 1947, and the war was over. Now there was music on every radio, and everybody wanted a new car. Nobody had a new car during the war — they weren’t making them — and nobody took pictures, because there wasn’t any film. One thing about a war? You never have new.

But now our fathers and brothers and cousins were home, and our Victory Gardens had been turned back into lawns, because now we could buy not only what we needed but what we wanted, vegetables and coffee and creamy butter. Cameras and cars, and brand-new washing machines, even. Appliances were the only reason my stepfather was getting rich.

We were lucky enough to live in Queens, where you could put a nickel in a turnstile and ride the subway to Manhattan, the place where everybody in the world wanted to be. They left the lights burning in the skyscrapers all night long, because they now could.”

Early on, Evie proves to be a sympathetic character. Though life is generally good after the war, Evie is having a tough enough time with adolescence: standing up to her best friend; convincing her mom to let her wear lipstick, perfume, and full-skirted dresses; filling out her bra; and of course, what 15-year old girls of all generations are concerned with — boys! Evie’s normalcy is the biggest draw for me. I do love a good story with regular people in it; and it’s something not many contemporary YA authors choose to write about.

The novel combines the mood of the era and the awkwardness of adolescence with a touch of mystery noir, a sinister thread deftly woven between the lines. Quite an ambitious mix, but Blundell ties them up quite nicely in less than 300 pages, and a very satisfying 300 pages (and couple of hours), at that.

But best of all, I think, is how spectacularly Blundell pulls off the coming of age. Of course, there’s the coming of age staple premise: here we have a girl in a hurry to grow up, playing dress up in her mom’s clothes, eager for her first dance, her first kiss. Circumstances beyond her control eventually force her into maturity, and your heart just breaks for her when they do, but Evie manages to rise above it with grace and wisdom beyond her years.

“During the war, whenever we had to give something up or put something off, we’d say it was ‘for the duration,’ ” Evie says at the end of the novel. “Because we didn’t know when the war would end, but we knew we’d stick with whatever we had to do.”

And then you just know, she’s grown up.

Definitely one of the best YA novels I’ve ever read.

***

What I Saw and How I Lied, hardcover, with dust jacket

5/5 stars

book #90 for 2011