Book Review: No More Lies

Synopsis:

Jenna Mason’s life appears to outside observers to be perfect. She enjoys a successful career as an animator, lives in a townhouse near the beach, and has an adoring son, Josh, whose artistic talent seems as promising as his mother’s.

But there’s something nobody knows about Jenna. Her birth name was Lily Carson. And she is a young mother on the run from secrets no one must ever uncover.

After years of constantly relocating, Jenna concedes to Josh’s pleas to settle down. He wants to have friends. He craves stability. He longs to feel normal. Jenna convinces herself they’re safe and even permits herself to believe that she and her fiancé, Kavan, can form a happy family with Josh and Kavan’s daughter, Uma.

Until, that is, an aggressive reporter discovers Jenna’s real identity, bringing her estranged father to her doorstep. When he threatens to expose her carefully fabricated life as the lie that it is, Jenna has no choice but to flee again.

But just as she’s about to run once more, Josh disappears and Jenna finds herself forced to seek out the one person she never thought she’d see again: Josh’s father.

Secrets and lies shadow Jenna in the second installment in bestselling author Kerry Lonsdale’s “No More” series.

Review:

Kerry Lonsdale is the author of the popular “Everything” series (Everything We Keep, Everything We Leave Behind, and Everything We Give), as well as three stand-alone novels: All the Breaking Waves, Last Summer , and Side Trip.

With No More Words, she launched her “No More” trilogy. Lonsdale says that at the heart of the series is her attempt to answer this question: “Does a parent’s dysfunction prevent the younger generation from having a normal life, or have circumstances fated them to live with their trauma?” Inspiration for the series came from an actual event. Lonsdale relates that she was awakened on a summer night at 2:00 a.m. She heard the sounds of glass shattering and metal on metal, and the smell of burnt rubber. From her window, she watched a vehicle drive straight across the street into her neighbor’s ex-husband’s truck, t-boning it. And then the driver of the car backed up and rammed the truck again, again, and again until she’d pushed the truck up over the sidewalk and onto the front lawn and the front end of the vehicle she was driving was thoroughly crumpled. She didn’t stop until the police arrived on the scene. Her face was bloody from hitting the steering wheel, her eyes had swollen shut. Lonsdale subsequently discovered that the driver of the vehicle was the man’s girlfriend, and she had driven four hours to illustrate her unhappiness at learning that he was spending the night at his ex-wife’s house.

But, Lonsdale notes, “the real tragedy was his daughter. He’d spent the night at his ex-wife’s house (on her couch) because he’d come to celebrate her eighth-grade graduation. And after the police left and ambulance drove off, I saw her standing on the porch dressed in pajamas, clutching her favorite stuffed animal. She’d witnessed the entire debacle.”

In the ensuing years, Lonsdale says she’s thought about that girl and wondered how that event, along with other incidents, impacted her. “I wondered how they changed her relationship with her father. Did she pick up his habits as she aged, his boozing and gambling? Did she ever have a chance at a normal life, or did her childhood doom her to live with secrets and pain?”

In No More Words, Lonsdale introduced three siblings: Olivia, Lucas, and Lily, the youngest. The story focused on Olivia and was related from her point of view. Suddenly, Josh, the nephew she had never met, showed up at her house. Lily, who ran away when she was just sixteen years old and pregnant, consistently sent Olivia a letter and picture of Josh every year, mailed from different locations and bearing no return address. Their father, Dwight, actively sought to destroy the sisters’ relationship, culminating with telling Olivia that the father of Lily’s unborn child was Olivia’s twenty-one-year-old boyfriend, Ethan. Lonsdale explored Olivia’s inability to trust and the various family conflicts and secrets leading up to Josh’s arrival.

Josh was unable to articulate how or why he made his way to Oliva’s house or the whereabouts of his mother. A large scar on his scalp led Olivia to believe he had recently suffered a traumatic brain injury resulting in aphasia (a compromised ability to communicate), and she set about learning what happened to Josh, as well as Lily’s whereabouts. She found herself attempting to piece together a fourteen-year-old mystery: What exactly happened to Lily, and why was she treated differently by their parents than Olivia and Lucas? Is Ethan really Josh’s father? If not, who is? And why did Lily abruptly leave, cutting off all ties with her family?

No More Lies is Jenna/Lily’s story and it opens months before Josh makes his way to Olivia’s home. He and Jenna (formerly Lily) reside in beautiful Oceanside, California, where she enjoys a successful career as an animator. Her YouTube cartoon became a viral sensation several years ago and now “Tabby’s Squirrel” is about to become a movie. Jenna has also signed a four-book contract. However, she carefully guards her identity, never conducting in-person interviews or permitting her photograph to be published. She eschews social media and forbids Josh to use it, which is a source of conflict between her and her adolescent son. For the past eighteen months, she and Josh have enjoyed a stable lifestyle, rather than moving every few months. Josh is approaching his thirteenth birthday, has made a few friends at school — one, in particular, named Anson, whose mother, Keely, has been very kind to both Josh and Jenna — and unequivocally expressed his desire to remain in one place. He is tired of constantly relocating. Jenna even accepted an engagement ring from Kavan, a restauranteur with whom she has allowed herself to fall in love. For the first time since she left home when she was carrying Josh at just sixteen years of age, she has let herself believe that she and Josh might actually be safe, with no need to remain on the run.

But as Jenna arrives at Josh’s school to pick him up, she learns that the other parents are gossiping about her and speculating about her past in a Facebook forum. A reporter for the Oceanside newspaper has discovered her real identity because of one bit of information she inadvertently let slip during an interview and is investigating the circumstances surrounding the death of her friend, Wes Jensen, who perished the night she ran away from home. Ryder, Wes’s older brother, was Jenna’s boss at the local 7-Eleven store where she worked and Jenna believes he stalked her until the point at which he was convicted of domestic violence and incarcerated, convinced that Jenna murdered Wes and intent on vengeance. Jenna has been burdened by guilt, shame, and fear since that night, believing that she was, in fact, responsible for Wes’s death and, if the authorities find her, she will be prosecuted and lose Josh. More pointedly, Josh will lose her.

Lonsdale relates, from Jenna’s perspective, the events leading up to Josh’s arrival at Olivia’s house. Jenna’s father, Dwight, from whom she has been estranged since that fateful night, arrives in Oceanside, leveling threats. Jenna is convinced that he is responsible for the disturbing appearance of items from the past, as well as notes meant to intimidate and frighten Jenna. She has never told Josh the truth about the past and when he comes face to face with the grandfather he has never seen before, his questioning about his family history only intensifies, as does his resolve to remain in Oceanside. Jenna has never told Kavan about her past, either, and fears that should he learn the whole truth, their relationship will be over, her chance for true happiness ripped away from her. Worse, she learns that Ryder has paroled.

Love can be blinding. Make one do unexplainable things to hold on to it. Like lie.

Lonsdale deftly intersperses chapters detailing Lily’s life as a sixteen-year-old in fictional Seaside Cove (situated up the coast near San Luis Obispo, California), commencing with the night she takes a home pregnancy test. She overhears a nightmarish argument between her parents and, when she refuses to accede to their demands, resolves to leave home for good in order to protect her unborn child. Lonsdale answers all the questions she left pending in No More Words about what Jenna’s life was like from that point forward. Similarly, a few chapters convey Josh’s perspective, supplying deeper context to what readers already learned about his experiences in the first installment.

Of course, readers of No More Words know whether Olivia and Josh are reunited with Jenna, but that does not diminish the emotional impact of learning the rest of the details, some quite harrowing, from Jenna’s vantage point. Because, Lonsdale observes, reading about the same series of events is a completely different experience since “interpretation and reaction can be distorted depending on the person telling the story and what they’re feeling at the time. What they’re protecting, which is usually themselves.”

In No More Lies, Lonsdale grippingly explores Jenna’s emotional tumult and the impact the secrets she has kept for so many years have had on both her and Josh, as well as what continuing to conceal the truth from Josh might eventually cost. “When we own the secrets, they give us the impression we’re in control. We keep them so as not to hurt others, but mostly to protect ourselves. We’re always trying to save our own hides,” Lonsdale explains. And that is a prominent theme in No More Lies. Determined to keep her baby when her parents demanded that she either have an abortion or put the child up for adoption, Jenna’s determination to run away was initially fueled, in large part, by maternal instinct. Lonsdale explores, through Jenna’s intense and fraught journey, whether that remains her prime motivation and, if not, what other factors, including her own desire for a conventional, transparent life, as well as the near-crippling fear she has lived with for thirteen years, have played into her decision-making. Lonsdale’s depicts Jenna’s increasing maturity, self-awareness, and recognition of how her motives have shaped her life and Josh’s, and what she is now willing to sacrifice in order to ensure Josh’s safety and happiness.

“And when we’re privy to a good secret?” Lonsdale notes. “Well, that’s a sense of control, too.” Control, manipulation, and retribution are also explored in No More Lies, a tale featuring some very clear-cut villains. The parents of Olivia, Lucas, and Lily were revealed in No More Words to be duplicitous, narcissistic, and willing to achieve their own selfish goals by any means necessary. Lily’s toxic relationship with her parents is further examined in this volume, as is Jenna’s gradual empowerment and refusal to be cowed by Dwight’s menacing reappearance and Ryder’s dedication to revenge.

Once again, Lonsdale seamlessly melds domestic drama and psychological suspense into a thoroughly absorbing story that advances at a steady pace. Lonsdale further develops the characters of Lilly/Jenna and Josh, endears readers to Kavan, and cements Dwight and Ryder’s deplorable natures. She also introduces readers to Murielle, who helped Lily when she first left her parents’ home, as well as Keely, who proves to be the first true friend Jenna has had in the ensuring years.

The intriguing and entertaining family saga will conclude in the third volume, No More Secrets, but readers will have to wait until 2023 to hear the story from Lucas’s perspective.