Book review: The Big Lie

Julie Mayhew – The Big Lie

Jessika is a good girl, one who follows the rules and questions nothing: until her best friend Clementine gets into trouble. Until she gets involved with her schoolfriend, GG, who wants to be kissed, unlike Clem. Until she begins to realise that the world she inhabits isn’t as truthful and right as she has been led to believe.

This is a compelling and believable look at what would have happened if the Nazis had won the Second World War – a concept that’s been explored over and over in fiction, but not typically from the perspective of young women. Jessika lives in a Britain which is part of the Greater German Reich, in a world where most of the things we know – the internet, smartphones, questionable fashion sense – exist, but are unfamiliar to this isolated empire. History is taught by the victors, so we learn of how dangerous Churchill was, and how important it was that Britain be liberated by the Nazis in the 1940s. At times this reminded me of Elizabeth Wein’s Rose Under Fire, a novel which deals with imprisonment in a women’s-only concentration camp, and at others it echoes tales of growing up under more recent totalitarian regimes. How does one rebel in this kind of society without becoming a martyr? How do you even start to unpick the lies that have been woven into your consciousness for as long as you can remember – not just by the state, but by your own family?

This thought-provoking page-turner is one to add to the to-read lists – for both teens and adults.