TBR Challenge: Diane Chamberlain - Big Lies in a Small Town

North Carolina, 2018: Morgan Christopher's life has been derailed. Taking the fall for a crime she did not commit, she finds herself serving a three-year stint in the North Carolina Women's Correctional Center. Her dream of a career in art is put on hold—until a mysterious visitor makes her an offer that will see her released immediately. Her assignment: restore an old post office mural in a sleepy southern town. Morgan knows nothing about art restoration, but desperate to leave prison, she accepts. What she finds under the layers of grime is a painting that tells the story of madness, violence, and a conspiracy of small town secrets.
North Carolina, 1940: Anna Dale, an artist from New Jersey, wins a national contest to paint a mural for the post office in Edenton, North Carolina. Alone in the world and desperate for work, she accepts. But what she doesn't expect is to find herself immersed in a town where prejudices run deep, where people are hiding secrets behind closed doors, and where the price of being different might just end in murder.
What happened to Anna Dale? Are the clues hidden in the decrepit mural? Can Morgan overcome her own demons to discover what exists beneath the layers of lies?

Comment: This years' TBR Challenge is almost complete, and for November the theme is "lies". Depending on how one would interpret this, plenty of books would certainly fit but I confess I was lazy this time and went with an obvious choice, the word is in the title and that means it would include some type of lies. It was also the first book by this author I tried.

In this dual time story, we follow the heroines Anna and Morgan as they set on accomplishing a task while dealing with their own thoughts and the circumstances they are in. Anna, in 1939, wins a competition to paint a mural in Edenton, North Carolina. The locals aren't too happy because she is from New Jersey and they feel a local artist should have won instead. Morgan, in 2018, is released on parole after one year in prison for a crime she isn't guilty of, but that still makes her feel that way. Anna is painting the mural in 1939 while having to deal with expectations and society's rules while Morgan in 2018 is tasked with restoring it, as decided in the will of artist Jesse Jameson William, who wanted to help Morgan as he did with other young struggling artists. As the restoring progresses, weird details come to life, but is there any way for Morgan to do a good job without knowing what Anna was thinking?

I had some expectations regarding this book. The author is prolific and some readers whose taste I share have liked this book and others too and I hoped that if this was a good one for me, I'd have so much more to look for. The genre is also one I tend to enjoy and the dual timed narrative can also be a good tactic, so I was hoping for a good read, even more so when I read here and there some readers using the expression "hint of romance".

In the beginning, all this was accomplished and I found myself captivated by both heroines' stories, told in alternate chapters. Morgan is a young woman, caught in one of those impossible situations where it seemed all went wrong and she lives with a sense of guilt and fear she won't measure up. I liked her sections and the small progress she does as she learns more about restoration and how curious she is about the mural and even Anna's life and why she opted for the details she did. I was also curious about how she would be portrayed after being in prison (apparently romances featuring young women coming out of prison is something I'm interested in) and how that would affect her future relationships.

Anna's chapters were a bit more challenging, in the sense that there is always this notion something will go wrong, the tone is one of calm before the storm and I don't know if this feeling affected my experience because when one knows something bad will happen is like just waiting for the inevitable... plus, obviously by Morgan's chapters we did know something had happened to Anna and that did colored my impression of the good things and the possible bad ones Anna was going through.

Anna is a very complex character, she had lost her mother, who we would see as being bipolar by today's standards and she killed herself. This affected Anna and there are comments duding the story that we doubt if Anna might be the same but to be fair, I think the author could have maintained this for longer or using different word choices. It is also interesting we get to know about Anna in the third person narrator and Morgan is in the first.

Morgan's path is a bit easier to understand and to root for, because her journey is open ended and we want to see her become stronger. I think it was a bit of a let down how her emotional progress felt so limited and simplified, I kind of wish the author had gone further in showcasing Morgan's personality and how she was becoming a better person, how being with new people, like Oliver, the responsible for the art gallery where the restored mural would be exhibited (alongside work by other artists Jesse Jameson Williams helped), and who aren't always certain will be a reciprocated love interest.

I suppose the easiest way to say is this, the emotional vibe and content just wasn't here. The story has all the details, the scenes, the inferring, the understanding of what it all means but the author wrote things only correctly and without the proper emotional attachment. the characters' actions just didn't read as being important to them, they felt flat and aloof and I didn't feel any emotions reading about them and what they went through. What a pity but if this is the author's usual style, then it's a well written narrative, just totally lacking empathy.

Closer to the end, as suggested by several details and the tone, something bad happens and we only learn about it because the author used one of those convenient devices (a diary) and then a twist comes in the very end which, had this been written in a more exciting way, would have had a stronger impact. The way things were, it was a good twist but I wasn't especially touched. As for the romance between Oliver and Morgan, although cute, was terribly superficial in my opinion, so that didn't "save" this for me either.

All in all, a competent story yes, with interesting content - it was fun to learn a little about art restoration - and ideas, but the execution wasn't as brilliant to me as I imagined. Too bad about the title, I feel "big lies" isn't such a good match to what really happened during Anna's time line and the blurb also seems a bit exaggerated. If I happen to get my hands on another book by the author I'll try it but it's not something I feel I have to get on purpose.

Grade: 7/10