Liar & Spy

Rebecca Stead’s third novel, Liar & Spy, represents a departure from her usual storytelling style, for it is her first story that is not a science-fiction mystery. For those readers who are familiar with Stead’s previous works, however, the author slyly use the trend of her past works to imply that the mystery Safer invents for Georges and himself might actually be real. In this way, Georges’s eventual revelation about the imaginary nature of “Mr. X’s” suspicious activity is intended to be just as much of a surprise to the reader as it is to Georges. Additionally, Stead has been praised for her realistic depiction of bullying and middle-school life and is frequently credited with highlighting the small-scale, everyday ways in which children are often harassed and demeaned by their peers. Instead of crafting an incident of obvious and horrific bullying, Stead’s novel depicts a pattern of insults, invasions of personal space, and other minor yet persistent forms of harassment that take place in plain sight but are consistently overlooked by teachers and administrators, even those who mean well.

Stead characterizes her novel within in the context of her own experiences as a child and as a parent. Much of the bullying in the novel is based upon her own middle-school memories of being socially isolated, with only one friend to her name. Georges’s flawed attempts to deal with the harassment by ignoring it were later reflected in her advice to her own children on how to handle such conflicts. In an interview with The Guardian, she explains that she would tell her children some variation of “It gets better” and “This too shall pass,” but she eventually realized that such advice robs her children of the right to advocate for themselves. When Georges’s mother gives the protagonist similar advice in the novel, it unintentionally causes Georges to endure the bullying in silence while desperately trying to rationalize his misery by telling himself that Dallas’s behavior is just one of “the little things” in life that does not deserve his time or energy. By contrast, Georges’s father represents the alternate perspective that Stead now wants to share: Even small examples of bullying are worth rejecting, and that it is important for children to stand up for themselves in the face of such social conflicts, for doing so allows them to develop a greater sense of agency and confidence that is vital to successfully navigating the challenges of the adult world.