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What were you excited to explore by including a podcast within the structure, as well as by having one of the narrators be a podcaster? Over hours of conversations, Josie shares an unsettling tale of how she came to be married to Walter.
The smile fixes on Josie’s face as she watches Alix Summer and her big group of friends, her red-haired husband with his arm draped loosely across the back of her chair, large platters of meats and breads being brought to their table and placed in front of them as if conjured out of thin air, the sound of them, the noise of them, the way they fill every inch of the space with their voices and their arms and their hands and their words. Unfortunately, Josie isn’t content to just complain about her own husband … Alix’s husband is also subject to Josie’s scathing opinions. The reason I am not giving None of This Is True five stars, which I thought I would for 95% of the book, is that I feel conflicted about the ending. because of this, the plot was not incredibly surprising and the plot twists were extremely mild/predictable… BUT all of it was unsettling and i enjoyed the vibe.
WARNING ⚠️ There IS an “ICK” factor to this book, and some of the subjects in the podcast include pedophiles, child abuse, and incest. I might have been a bit negative on this one, but be assured it is wildly entertaining and addictive!
In 2019, “Birthday Twins” Alix Summers and Josie Fair meet for the first time on their forty–fifth birthday in a pub where they have both come to celebrate- Alix with her husband and friends and Josie with her husband. The softly spoken, fifty-something babysitter left half an hour ago and the house is tidy, the dishwasher hums, the cat is pawing its way meaningfully across the long sofa toward Alix, already purring before Alix’s hand has even found her fur.
A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Nathan sits heavily next to her and rolls his Scotch around a solitary ice cube, one of the huge cylindrical ones he makes from mineral water. These tidbits add another layer to the events, but the snippets don’t show the whole of the situation until the end when the truth is finally revealed. The premise of this one had me really looking forward to it – a strange woman befriends a podcaster and drags her into her strange, dark world. There are a few aspects that I had to overlook up until this point, behaviors and lack of affirmative action in the characters that I don’t think would play out the way it did in the book in real life, but understandably needed to be done to progress this particular story.
Meet Josie Fair, a 45-year-old woman navigating the complexities of a marriage with a man twice her age, a mother to two daughters and a dog enthusiast. Biography: Lisa Jewell's first novel, Ralph's Party, was published in 1999 and was the best-selling debut novel of the year. Special thanks to NetGalley and Atria Books for sharing this brilliant novels of digital copy in exchange my honest thoughts. Alix Summer is a 45-year-old journalist who hosts a successful podcast and lives in a stylish townhouse with a built-in recording studio. Why do you think Josie imbues this relatively ordinary coincidence with so much importance and meaning?
After their first meeting, Josie “feels the gnawing sense of grief that she has experienced for most of her life rush through her” and comes to the realisation that “literally everything about [herself] is wrong and that she’s running out of time to make herself right”. Alix Summers, a popular podcaster, is out celebrating her forty-fifth birthday when she meets her birthday twin Josie Fair. As the birthday celebrations get underway, a chance encounter between Josie and Alix reveals they not only share the same birth date, but they were also born in the same hospital, on the same day, and went to the same school. Finished this just now and it was okay, but also a huge missed opportunity, because I felt that the double twist of Josie possibly being right after all could have been delivered as a huge gut punch but instead it's just this small three page epilogue that only concerns a part of her narrative and feels like an afterthought, the equivalent of some cheap "gotcha" scene at the end of a horror film.
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