Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Nov 2008
288 pages
Genre: Mysteries
Publication Information
When Evie's father returned home from World War II, the family fell back into its normal life pretty quickly. But Joe Spooner brought more back with him than just good war stories. When movie-star handsome Peter Coleridge, a young ex-GI who served in Joe's company in postwar Austria, shows up, Evie is suddenly caught in a complicated web of lies that she only slowly recognizes. She finds herself falling for Peter, ignoring the secrets that surround him . . . until a tragedy occurs that shatters her family and breaks her life in two.
As she begins to realize that almost everything she believed to be a truth was really a lie, Evie must get to the heart of the deceptions and choose between her loyalty to her parents and her feelings for the man she loves. Someone will have to be betrayed. The question is . . . who?
National Book Awards, 2008
"Readers can taste Evie's alienation and her yearning; it's a stylish, addictive brew." - Publishers Weekly.
"... an addictive read unlike any other. Evie's character undergoes such a journey that the reader can truly feel her struggles and be there for her as she uncovers her own version of falling down the rabbit hole, like Alice in Wonderland." - TeenReads.com.
"Using pitch-perfect dialogue and short sentences filled with meaning, Blundell has crafted a suspenseful, historical mystery that not only subtly explores issues of post–WWII racism, sexism, and socioeconomic class, but also realistically captures the headiness of first love and the crushing realization that adults are not all-powerful." - Booklist.
This information about What I Saw And How I Lied was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Judy Blundell has written books for middle grade, young adult, and adult readers under several pseudonyms. Her novel, Premonitions, was an ALA Reluctant Readers Best Picks and was chosen by the New York Public Library as a 2004 Best Books for the Teen Age. She also wrote Book #4 in the New York Times bestselling series, The 39 Clues. 2008 National Book Award winner for her YA novel What I Saw and How I Lied, Judy Blundell is well known to Star Wars fans by her pseudonym, Jude Watson.
Judy Blundell lives in Katonah, New York, with her husband and daughter.
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