Here We Lie

by Paula Treick DeBoard

Overview

“A complex look at the long-standing consequences of privilege and toxic masculinity…. Compulsively readable!” —Kate Moretti, New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Year

Megan Mazeros and Lauren Mabrey are complete opposites on paper. Megan is a girl from a modest Midwest background, and Lauren is the daughter of a senator from an esteemed New England family. When they become roommates at a private women’s college, they forge a strong, albeit unlikely, friendship, sharing clothes, advice and their most intimate secrets.

The summer before senior year, Megan joins Lauren and her family on their private island off the coast of Maine. It should be a summer of relaxation, a last hurrah before graduation and the pressures of postcollege life. Then late one night, something unspeakable happens, searing through the framework of their friendship and tearing them apart. Many years later, Megan publicly comes forward about what happened that fateful night, revealing a horrible truth and threatening to expose long-buried secrets.

In this captivating and moving novel, Paula Treick DeBoard explores the power of friendship and secrets, and shows how hiding from the truth can lead to devastating consequences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780778330264
Publisher:	Park Row Books
Publication date:	01/30/2018
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Paula Treick DeBoard is the author of The Mourning Hours, The Fragile World and The Drowning Girls. She divides her time between reading, writing, teaching composition at the University of California, Merced, and enjoying the antics of her husband Will and their four-legged brood. She is a resident of northern California.

Editorial Reviews

10/16/2017
With this story of two very different young women, DeBoard (The Drowning Girls) portrays the lies that people tell to find acceptance and the terrible acts that powerful people casually commit. The story opens in the present with a press conference about a woman’s rape by a U.S. senator. The narrative alternates between this story line and one set in the late ’90s and early aughts, in which poor Kansas girl Megan Mazeros forms a friendship with Connecticut senator’s daughter Lauren Mabrey at all-girls Keale College. Each conceals a painful secret, and when the two are thrown together as roommates, they fall into the habit of using casual lies to paper over their differences, to hide their secrets, and even simply to amuse each other. Megan fabricates a history even more desperate than her real life to impress Lauren, the product of prep schools. Later, Lauren conceals her relationship with a young man that Megan briefly liked. The lies exacerbate the differences between the two until a horrific attack on the Mabrey family island off the coast of Maine shatters their friendship. While the rape looms in the future as a foregone conclusion, DeBoard only slowly reveals the details, so the final revelations are all the more powerful. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"DeBoard does a wonderful job creating her realistic and flawed characters, giving even secondary characters a rich backstory and a haunting sense of intrigue. This story particularly resonates now, in the throes of the #MeToo movement."-Booklist

"A nuanced and complex look at the long-standing consequences of privilege and toxic masculinity. At its heart, Here We Lie examines the seemingly unbreakable bonds of both friendship and family, and the lengths one will go to take care of their own. Compulsively readable!"-Kate Moretti, New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Year

"A wrenching tale of broken friendship and shattered dreams."-Kirkus Reviews

"With Here We Lie, Paula Treick de Board spins a mesmerizing tale of two former best friends and one shocking secret. Suspenseful and evocative, with pitch-perfect prose and pacing, Here We Lie is a story that resonates long after the last word. An engrossing read." -Kimberly Belle, national bestselling author of The Marriage Lie

From her riveting first chapter, DeBoard casts a line back in time and reels an unlikely college friendship ever closer to the novel's inevitable conclusion. An absorbing exploration of how we attain personal power and the consequences of wielding it." -Kathryn Craft, award-winning author of The Far End of Happy and The Art of Falling

"Set against a backdrop of college life, politics, and sexual assault, Paul Treick DeBoard explores the exquisite joy of discovering the perfect friendship-then the acute pain of disentangling when that friendship sours. Here We Lie takes you a remarkable journey of two girls who learn, together and alone, to decide who they will ultimately be-it is at once observant, devastating, and thoroughly satisfying."-Emily Carpenter, author of The Weight of Lies  and Burying the Honeysuckle Girls

"With this story of two very different young women, DeBoard portrays the lies that people tell to find acceptance and the terrible acts that powerful people casually commit... While the rape looms in the future as a foregone conclusion, DeBoard only slowly reveals the details, so the final revelations are all the more powerful." –Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2017-10-31
After her father dies of cancer, leaving behind a life insurance payout, Megan Mazeros pulls up stakes in Kansas and tries to start over as a student at a posh women's college in Connecticut. Her new life, however, might just ruin her.Nursing her grief, and some shame at having helped her father to his final peace, Megan arrives in Scofield late, in the dark, and with no idea how to get to Keale College. Luckily, she stumbles upon charismatic Joe Natolo, a local man who never went to college but finds Megan intriguing, unlike most of the privileged women at the school on the hill. Megan settles into her studies, tolerating her overachieving roommate and seeing Joe around town. After her roommate's suicide attempt, Megan finds she has a new roommate: Lauren Mabrey, reckless daughter of a revered U.S. senator from Connecticut and an overbearing mother. Reeling after her mother broke up her romance with a drug dealer, Lauren is on her last chance at Keale. Lauren and Megan become fast friends, telling each other their deepest secrets and a few lies, and Megan finds herself spending holidays with the Mabreys. One fateful summer, however, a violent encounter snaps every thread, leaving only one friend finishing her degree. With each chapter shifting perspective between Lauren and Megan, DeBoard (The Mourning Hours, 2016, etc.) lets each woman's story reflect and distort the other's, deftly angling the mirror of truth to show each woman's best side. Fourteen years later, what happened that summer night is still unspoken, and the friends have gone their separate ways, but when Megan sees a woman on television accusing Sen. Mabrey of sexual assault, she knows she must break the silence even if it means giving up all hope of ever reconciling with Lauren.A wrenching tale of broken friendship and shattered dreams.

Kirkus Reviews