Courage put Libby Brown into the final selection for the Olympics, but betrayal crushed her spine and her chance at the Gold. Now she has two choices, use her courage to put her life back together, or remain shattered forever.
—-
Unfortunately this is a DNF at 19% for me. I had high hopes for this book, thinking it would be similar to Scars Like Wings by Erin Stewart and Faceless by Alyssa Sheinmel. As a disabled person myself, I’m always looking for stories of disability that are skilfully and sensitively told. Unfortunately, this wasn’t one of those for me.
Within a few chapters, I’d picked up on quite a few ableist sentences. When Libby becomes paralysed following a skiing accident, she tells readers, ‘I might as well be dead if I couldn’t walk or ski or do anything that I loved. I couldn’t imagine how it would be to be trapped in a wheelchair the rest of my life, and I willed that image to disappear.’ This immediately set off alarm bells for me as I’ve had so many people devalue my own life since becoming disabled, people telling me that they’d rather be dead than live as I do. I really didn’t like the idea of being ‘trapped’ in a wheelchair given that wheelchairs offer freedom to so many disabled people that they wouldn’t ordinarily have. Still, I persevered with this book. I thought maybe this was just Libby’s mindset at the start of her journey as she was still coping with her new reality. I was hoping to see a transformation in her mindset and her acknowledging that her earlier thoughts were harmful and ableist.
I don’t know if this does happen, as I stopped reading at chapter nine. The above quotes were around chapter three, but by chapter nine we had more ableism and I simply wasn’t enjoying the story. Reading was feeling like a chore. Another instance of ableism I picked out was this one, which Libby uses when ‘evaluating’ her new room mate at the rehab centre: ‘More to the point, how could a one-legged swimmer have three boyfriends and the attitude of the Dali Lama?’ Just, urgh. She uses the term ‘one-legged’ in a clearly negative way here and she’s just so judgemental of her new ‘friend’, only seeing the disability.
Leading on from that, I didn’t find Libby likeable, yet I also felt like I didn’t know her. There wasn’t a great deal of deep characterisation for her or any of the characters, in my opinion. And the writing was kind of clunky. The very first paragraph tells us about a girl, Etta, who wasn’t then in any of the first nine chapters again. There’s no mention of a first-person narrator in that paragraph, so I assumed at first that Etta was the main character and that it was a third-person narrative. That seemed like a really poor opening to me.
There was a lot of repetition of phrasing too. We’re constantly told that voices interrupt Libby’s thoughts when she’s in hospital, and so many chapters began in similar ways. For my day job, I work as a developmental editor for a publisher and I’m a writing teacher, and there were just so many little things like this that I would’ve flagged if I’d been editing it. These things just meant I couldn’t get into the story to enjoy it.
And there were some big pacing issues—the characters constantly refer to important things that have happened off-page that the reader doesn’t actually witness. One major example of this is how suddenly were told Libby has a boyfriend when she’s at the rehab centre and sees her roommate with hers. I didn’t spot any mention of Libby having a boyfriend prior to this, but then we’re told that all this time the boyfriend had been trying to get in contact with her. That seemed like an afterthought and I couldn’t work out why this hadn’t been incorporated more smoothly into the narrative earlier on.
And then Libby and her boyfriend break up. Take a look at this passage:
“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “I asked you here to tell you that since things are so, well, different” —I held onto the arms of the wheelchair like a lifesaver— “I’ll understand if you have to move on. Your degree. Your life. You know.” I had to stop so my voice didn’t catch. “Hey, but thanks for coming by.”
For the first time our eyes connected.
“I’m sticking if you want me to.” Now his voice sounded pinched, maybe panicked. He’s afraid I’ll take him up on his offer. It wasn’t so much how he’d said those words as it was the way he sat pulled away from me, ready to bolt for the door that made me flinch.
I shook my head. “No.” The word came out sharp and final. “I don’t think that’s necessary.”
[…]
“I’m really sorry—”
And that’s all you can come up with? Sorry was such a limp word.
I shook my head. “Not your fault. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if Ben had pulled himself out of bed that morning and gone with me. He might have taken the hit instead of me. He might have heard the snowboarder coming at us and shoved me out of the way.
“I know, but I, well I’m just—”
“Don’t be.” I did not want to hear the word sorry from him. I hadn’t expected our meeting to go this way. I’d expected him to protest more. I hadn’t expected my heart to shrink when he turned his back and vanished out the door.
This was the point that really got to me, Like, I understood Libby’s feelings. I’d felt that before, being convinced no one would want me for my disability—but I wanted either him to fight for her here or for her to just be angry or something. Instead, she’s just accepting of it. I don’t know if we get more on this later, if I’m fact Libby does realise she still has worth. But this, combined with the earlier ableism and the pacing issues, just meant I couldn’t read any further.
In fact, the only thing that had kept me reading that far was the mystery element, that we know that the ski accident wasn’t an accident. Someone had paid a guy to cause the accident. I loved that, but it just wasn’t enough to keep me reading.
I feel bad giving this book one star, but it read like an unedited draft to me and the ableism was a big problem.
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Never Tell A Lie by Gail Schimmel
