How We Learned To Lie

Gr 9 Up—Joan is a young, black girl from Long Island who loves science. Daisy is a white, engineering-obsessed boy from a broken home. These neighbors and friends have different ways of looking at the world that help to inform the other. At the center of some shady dealings in their small town is Robbie McNamara, Daisy's brother. As Robbie gets deeper and deeper into crime and violence, Joan and Daisy are languidly driven apart as their views about Robbie start to deviate. This novel, loosely connected to Miller's Little Wrecks, takes place in 1979 and alternates between Joan's and Daisy's first-person perspectives. The book suffers somewhat from an extremely slow pace and constant foreshadowing, as characters hint but do not explicitly tell us what will eventually happen. There is not much action driving the plot. Robbie is mentioned more than seen, giving readers little investment in his character and ultimate fate. The story finds balance and grace in a few scenes between Robbie and his perfectionist mother, who seems disconnected and aloof concerning her children following her husband's untimely prison sentence.