Last Girl Lied To. L.E. Flynn 2019, 344 pages.

Last Girl Lied To L.E. Flynn, 2019, 344 Pages.

I picked out this new modern day thriller only because of a couple rave reviews on the jacket and because the author lives in London, Ontario, although I had never heard of her in the fifty one years I lived there. I had difficulty relating to the characters, given that they are almost all teenage students in a California coastal town in 2018. Perhaps my imagination just won’t stretch that far.

The introspection, peer pressures, lies, conflicts, longings and lusts, wild drunken parties, casual hookups (a term that did not exist in this context when I was a teen- it meant hooking up an implement to a tractor), jealousies, extreme emotional lability and mental anguish of the characters are totally foreign to me, even as I think back to my experiences as a free-range rural teen. Without texting, email, Google, or even television or booze in the house, the only parties were on the party line phone where one call would bring six or eight men for a day of hard work harvesting oats, wheat or corn. If there were girls trying desperately to get me to hookup, or even date them, I was too naive or too busy studying to notice. We had our eccentricities, but mental illness was never labelled as such and I was only ever aware of two suicides in my community; in this story two classmates appear to commit suicide by drowning, exactly one year apart. And if my urban children in their teens in the 90s with booze, parties, and television readily available experienced the degree of emotional distress of the characters in this book, I was oblivious to it or in denial.

The book is chopped up into 92 very short chapters, not all arranged chronologically. Universally, the characters appear to be white, urban, and from the middle class, not the demographics of present-day coastal California.

In spite of my reservations about the exaggerated characters, the surprise ending is totally unpredictable, unique, and inspired.

I suspect that most present day teens and even their parents will relate to, and enjoy this book more than I did. And I hope that my grandchildren never experience the extreme teen angst depicted here. But I may remember something from this book when they reach their late teens.