25. The Lie Tree, by Frances Hardinge

Hardinge, F. (2016). The lie tree. NY: Abrams, Inc. 

The book follows Faith Sunderly, the fourteen-year-old protagonist, who is reluctantly traveling with her parents to Vane so her father, the Reverend Erasmus, can help out with an archaeological site.    They begin on a bleak journey through the English Channel by boat to the island of Vane.  In Victorian England, the scientific community is still coming to terms with the theory of evolution, trying in different ways to fit it in with its Creationist religious beliefs. Erasmus has recently landed a place in the spotlight for his discovery of the fossil of a winged man.

After her family settles into their new home on the island, Faith’s own scientific curiosity leads her to believe things may not be as they seem with their father. Rather than moving solely to explore a dig site, the family has moved to evade questions about the authenticity of his fossil. Suddenly, her father is discovered dead, and Faith’s mother and uncle rush to prevent public accusations of suicide from getting to the media. Meanwhile, Faith believes he has been murdered and resolves to find out why.

Faith first traces her father’s footsteps to his most recent discovery. The specimen is a strange tree whose fruit is supposed to induce visions in the people who consume it. Even stranger, the tree only flowers and bears fruit if it is fed whispered lies, which the whisperer must then spread to other people. Sure, that her father was murdered, Faith creates a lie that his ghost is haunting the island because it is angry with the village residents who keep saying he committed suicide. In place of suicide, Faith plants the suggestion that the archaeological site is actually the site of buried treasure from a past smuggler, and that someone else wanted to get at it first. As Faith nurtures this story, it travels throughout the whole island, causing turmoil and violence among its people.

The Lie Tree soon becomes a tool for Faith to express her most malicious impulses.  Her use of the tree is justified as human given her background: she is resentful of having spent her fourteen years alive treated as incompetent, weak, and stupid whenever she tried to speak intelligently. She was forced into the sexist gender expectations for young girls to be meek and quiet. For example, Faith terrorizes a young servant girl who was the first to suggest that Erasmus committed suicide. She also blackmails a village boy into assisting with the murder mystery. Then, in one of her worst rumors, she convinces the islanders to hurt Miss Hunter, who is in charge of the post office.   Faith is causing harm to her community, but in doing so, is enabled to see and understand more about the world. She meets people she would normally never be allowed to talk to, gaining exposure to the darker parts of her seemingly polite world. As a result, she is able to change her conception of herself into a more ideal form less hindered by the oppressive gender norms of her world. This freedom for self-determination also helps her ability to recognize and call out the oppression of others: for example, her left-handed brother is forced to keep his dominant arm in a sling out of a religious belief that the right hand should be dominant.

Faith ultimately finds that the perpetrator of the murder was Agatha, a brilliant scientist and naturalist who found it impossible to succeed in her place and time despite her brilliant mind. Ironically, Faith sympathizes with her father’s murderer, having felt the same oppression throughout her young life. But, while Faith’s ultimate goal, given her condition, is to better understand and gain tools for dealing with a confusing external world, Agatha’s downfall is in her decision to get rich by committing murder and stealing the Lie Tree from Erasmus. Afterward, she contracts malaria and falls into deep alcoholism. By the end of the novel, she has committed suicide, giving Faith’s vengeful murder investigation closure that triggers her own empathy.

Agatha’s act constitutes in part a look at who Faith might become if she continues on a path of malice and resentment. Avoiding that path, Faith reconciles with her mother and brother, learning to internalize the values of the family in order to furnish an identity and gain some semblance of freedom and self-determination.

One important theme of the book is women's place in society. Faith is a bright, young woman who is interested in science and her father’s work.  Because she is female in the late 19^th century England, she can’t pursue her passions because of her sex.  There was even a ridiculous line in the book that talked about how men’s brains were superior to women’s because they were larger.   There is foreshadowing dealing with this theme as well.  Faith admires Agatha and how she seemed  to “ beat the system” and followed her dreams by studying science.  When she discovers Agatha killed her father, she sees her live becoming like Agatha’s and decides to change her path.  

This book is on the YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults list.