This Story Is a Lie by Tom Pollock

Abstract

Reviewed by: This Story Is a Lie by Tom Pollock Karen Coats Pollock, Tom This Story Is a Lie. Soho Teen, 2018 [336p] ISBN 978-1-61695-911-1 $18.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12 British seventeen-year-old Peter Blankman looks for secret codes and patterns in everything, hoping to hold at bay the panic attacks that plague him. His neuroscientist mother is reassuring, but his chief ally has always been his twin sister, Bel, who is as fearless as Peter is fearful. Just prior to the start of an award ceremony to honor his mother, Peter flees the increasingly claustrophobic room only to hear her scream from behind him a few minutes later; she has been stabbed and Bel is missing. Peter and his mother are immediately whisked away to a secret facility, and a plot beyond even Peter's wildest fears begins to unfold. Packed with as much witty inner monologue as nonstop action, this heady mystery invites readers to consider everything from neuro-engineering to the indeterminate meaning of life. Peter's existential crises are those of a hyperintelligent, obsessional math geek as he tries to find the core of himself through a mathematical proof, only to have his world undone by Gödel's undecidability theorem. Readers who are not mathematically inclined, however, will still be swept along by hyperviolent and breathless escape sequences straight out of the latest cinematic spy thriller. Gaspworthy twists come out of nowhere, later to be explained by Peter's "recursions" into memories that, in geek speak, "encrypt" and ultimately "invert" the circumstances of his life that he has taken for granted as true, transforming his deep-seated paranoia into his saving virtue. Readers won't soon forget this very smart, thoroughly original science fiction action-adventure. Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois