Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty
I was supposed to listen to this while I was on the train, but I made the mistake of starting it while I was packing for my trip and I didn’t stop listening to it until it was done…long before it was time to leave. I quickly became obsessed with all of the people that populate the book Big Little Lies. I may not have always liked each character and I may not have always agreed with the choices that a character made, but I came to know them very well and, at least, understand why they made those decisions. Not only were the characters interesting and well defined, but the mystery aspect was enough of a puzzle, and the narration by Caroline Lee was a delightful performance of the text.
The novel opens on Trivia Night with an event that is being investigated by the police. 
We do not know what has occurred but there are police interviews interspersed throughout which both give an account of what may have contributed to the incident in question and serve to underline the sort of gossip-filled community in which these characters reside.
The novel Big Little Lies is a deftly woven story of a group of parents whose children all go to the same elementary school and are in the same class. School politics and classroom drama spill over into the lives of the parents, who, at the end of the day, are devoted to their children. The subtleties of the story is its strength. It is also why the adaptation to the screen feels so clunky and unrefined. When it loses a lot of the little lies, they just don’t feel as big. Which, I think, the script writers were feeling as they tried to adapt this for the small screen. They were feeling the loss of complexity and therefore the loss of tension and intrigue. And so they made changes. So many weird and unnecessary changes. These changes were both to plot and to character traits and left me desperate to read the book again to cleanse all these truly terrible changes from my mind.
I feel like the story has not only been compromised, but it has been assaulted by all of these changes. Not enough drama? Add GUNS! Can’t convey the complex and subtle emotions? Add an AFFAIR! Want to convey that the abusive relationship is complicated? Add SEX!! Seriously…why? The original material was a virtuoso with such a grounded and organic tension, it didn’t need the salacious and inane additions that the adaptation came to rely upon.
In my mind, any adaptation, whether it be for the big or the small screen, is successful if it leaves you wanting more. That is to say, if it causes you to want to go back to the source material to experience more of the world you have come to love, hate, or puzzle over. However, if I had seen the adaptation before having read the book I know that I never would have picked up the novel at all. And that would have been a huge mistake because Big Little Lies is truly a captivating tale about every day people living an every day life.
Big Little Lies is best enjoyed in its original novel form as read by narrator Caroline Lee.
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