Lindsay's Reviews > The Lie Tree

A wonderfully intricate story of community, family, truth and lies done as a Victorian murder mystery/dark fantasy.

Faith Sunderly and her family have moved to the small island of Vane as a refuge from the society gossip around her disgraced father. The people of the island initially welcome them, but fairly quickly the rumors about her father travel even to remote Vane and the family is again in disgrace. Faith's father is found dead soon after, an apparent suicide. Only Faith believes otherwise, but the restrictions placed on a young woman in Victorian times make it difficult to pursue, but she does. In the process she discovers the focus of her father's obsession: the Lie Tree, which grows only in darkness and gives the fruit of secret truth when fed with lies.

First impressions of her parents have her mother as vain and shallow and her father as a strict obsessive authoritarian. Nothing is that simple here, either with these characters or any other of the intricate characters throughout the book. The effects of the various truths and lies here are played out through the characters, with even relatively harmless falsehoods told to deserving victims being shown to full effect.

The murder mystery is also brilliantly done, with many suspects throughout. In typical murder mystery fashion there were several times I was thinking, "I bet so-and-so did it" only to change my mind a few pages later. And it all seamlessly blends with the dark fantasy and character elements.

And you get all this through a filter into Victorian England and some of its oddities like mourning portraits and ratting pits. There's also a sub-plot of Darwin's introduction of evolution and the sort of impact it's having on the intellectual people of this time, including Faith's father who is an Anglican Rector, but also a natural scientist interested in fossils. And of course, it's deeply feminist, looking at the role of women as wives, servants, would-be scientists and how it all fits with the society at the time.

I'll end this by repeating Patrick Ness's blurb of this:

The Lie Tree is brilliant: dark, thrilling, utterly original. Everyone should read Frances Hardinge. Everyone. Right now.