REVIEW: "The Little Liar" by Mitch Albom (2-stars)

A friend really enjoyed this, and I can understand why: it's engineered to be emotionally accessible, visually vivid, and structured like a prestige‑limited Netflix series. But for me, it lands in the same category as All the Light We Cannot See: a novel that mistakes sentiment for depth, set pieces for storytelling, and archetypes for characters.

Albom chooses an omniscient narrator, literally "Truth," which should open the door to moral complexity. Instead, it flattens everything. The characters aren't people so much as positions on a chessboard, moved around to deliver lessons rather than to live believable lives.

The central premise could have been extraordinary: a child manipulated by a Nazi officer into luring his own family onto a train, who grows up wealthy, powerful, and haunted, quietly supporting survivors while hunting the man who destroyed his life. That's a novel with teeth, much like Doerr's book would have been a novel with teeth about a wacky, possibly gay uncle running a pirate radio station under the noses of the Germans. But, like Doerr, Albom refuses to write that novel and writes one designed to be popular instead.

The "hidden girl" subplot is Albom at his most unintentionally comedic: Fannie is sheltered by a river woman, rescued by a Famous Hungarian Actress, and eventually resurfaces as projectionist for her secretive childhood friend, bringing him home-cooked comfort food like some kind of Holocaust-trauma-infused fairy godmother. It's not character development; it's emotional garnish. And then there are the atrocities — Albom's version of gravitas. A baby thrown from a train. A Holocaust survivor's lifelong guilt. The climactic brotherly betrayal / reunited / taking-a-bullet / killing-the-Nazi sequence that is pure storyboard masquerading as storytelling. None of it is earned. None of it is psychologically grounded. It's cheap catharsis.

I recently rewatched the X-Files pilot and had an immediate realization: it hasn't aged well. The infamous "mammalian corpse" that terrified audiences in the 90s now looks like a rubber prop under bad lighting — a cheap shock designed to provoke a reaction before you notice the seams, the latex, the manipulation. That's exactly what Albom's atrocities are: not integrated into the emotional or moral architecture of the book, just horrors tossed in for shock value with no psychological or thematic follow-through. Once you see it, the whole thing collapses.

The final twist, that the narrator "Truth" is actually Fannie, is the same kind of faux-profound flourish. It doesn't recontextualize anything. It's just a Hallmark-grade metaphysical wink.

I disliked it less than All the Light We Cannot See, but the same hollowness is there: a screenplay in waiting, not a novel. Beautifully framed scenes, emotionally manipulative beats, and characters who exist to be moved through them.

If you want a fable about redemption, this will work for you. If you want a novel about the Holocaust with emotional, moral, or psychological weight, this isn't it.

REVIEW: "The Little Liar" by Mitch Albom RATING: 2-stars