Little Red Lies

Waiting for her soldier brother to return from WWII, almost-fourteen-year-old Rachel asserts that she's conquered childhood. That's just the first of many levels of lies, concealed truths, and pretense explored in this engrossing, finely wrought novel set in a small Ontario town. Rachel is a sympathetic, naïve narrator, and Johnston plays out her rich themes thoroughly yet with great subtlety.

Waiting on the train platform for her soldier brother Jamie to return from WWII (and wearing a sophisticated shade of lipstick called Little Red Lies), almost-fourteen-year-old Rachel asserts that she’s conquered childhood: “Gone. Finished.” In fact—gauche, impetuous, overly imaginative, and clueless—she has a long way to go. That’s just the first of many levels of lies, concealed truths, and pretence explored in this engrossing, finely wrought novel. When it’s discovered that Jamie has leukemia, Rachel refuses to believe it, then drags Jamie to a faith healer; and when she discovers that the preacher is a fake, she covers it up, afraid the truth will undermine Jamie’s recovery. Suddenly, Rachel’s upright, energetic mother is tired and moody; Rachel and Jamie find out that she’s pregnant only after the whole town knows, and only by accident. Rachel’s small Ontario town harbors even more secrets, including the fact that her handsome new “dreamboat” of an English teacher is a lecherous molester of teenage girls. Standing out in stark relief from all the subterfuge is one true thing: a series of letters interspersed throughout the novel describing the war in brutal frankness, written by Jamie to Rachel but never sent. Johnston (The Only Outcast, rev. 1/99; In Spite of Killer Bees, rev. 1/02) plays out her very rich themes thoroughly yet with great subtlety, and in Rachel she creates a narrator as sympathetic as she is (for the time being) naive. martha v. parravano