Book Review: Liar, Dreamer, Thief by Maria Dong

This is an absolutely tremendous book, and my first five-star (out of five stars) read of the year.

Katrina Kim feels like a failure. Once a promising musician with two loving parents, she now lives estranged from them, and tries to make ends meet by clinging for dear life to her soul-destroying temp job. Her roommate Leonie is a traveling physical therapist who does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to adulting, but in her long absences, Katrina has a tendency to spin out, escaping into a reality she terms “the kitchen-door world.”

Back when she was a little girl, Katrina took comfort in a children’s book called Mi-Hee and the Mirror-Man, the first book she ever saw with a protagonist who looked like her. Since the rupture with her parents, the fantasy realm that Mi-Hee accessed through her kitchen-door has crept into Katrina’s own life, offering her both escape and reassurance whenever her anxieties get the better of her. She knows, however, that her almost hallucinatory reliance on this coping mechanism isn’t healthy, even as its hold on her psyche strengthens:

It doesn’t matter that it’s bad for me, that the short-lived relief from the kitchen-door world can’t compete with the shame of needing it in the first place. It doesn’t even matter that I’m not always in control—that the kitchen-door world can overtake me through no choice of my own, that I can’t always tell what’s real and what isn’t. No matter what, I’m always just a breath away from slipping beneath its surface, from seeing and hearing the fantastic overlaid on everything around me.

These delusions are only the tip of the iceberg, though, when it comes to Katrina’s mental fixations. She’s obsessed with endekagrams, believing that carefully sketching a series of them before she leaves the house will keep her safe. She’s also convinced that she and her co-worker Kurt Smith share an esoteric connection, even after he turns hostile towards her.

So she’s not as surprised as she might be when a late-night visit to the Cayatoga Bridge—another of the rituals she uses to keep herself centered in the real world—seems to summon him to the same area. When he subsequently flings himself off of the bridge while screaming blame at her, Katrina is understandably shaken. She immediately goes to report the incident to the police, who think she’s just drunk and hysterical. Desperate to prove, even if only to herself, that she didn’t just hallucinate the entire episode, she begins to dig even more deeply into Kurt’s life than she had previously. What she finds sends her on an odyssey that could make her fragile psyche whole once more or rip her apart for good.

For the first third of this wildly entertaining book, I often found myself wondering how this story of a young woman whose mental illnesses have her living in a fantasy world could possibly count as a crime read. About halfway through this novel, however, I understood entirely, and understood also why the marketing has been so vague about it. Liar, Dreamer, Thief is an intricate puzzle box of a fair-play mystery that’s so exquisitely constructed that talking about the central conundrum itself, however obliquely, feels like giving too much away.

But even more than being a terrific mystery that masterfully bends and blends genres, this was a genuinely affecting book about what it means to always be different. Katrina has long felt that her place in society is tenuous, whether it be due to being Korean, being poor, or being a person with mental illness. Yet still she fights: to be believed, to be seen, even to just exist. This is a large part of why visiting the bridge is such a big deal to her, and why Kurt’s suicide haunts her so:

I’ve read articles on this. Jumpers break bones, lacerate hearts and spleens, knock their brains against their skulls. Death takes you fast–hopefully instantly, although it can take a few minutes if you’re one of the unlucky ones who survive the impact and has to either bleed out or drown.

 

Many people they just don’t find. They’re swallowed up, as if they never existed at all.

 

I stand on the bridge and stare at the water until I’m sure it’s enough. Until I’m sure I got what I came for, until I understand the dangers of letting go.

Katrina’s quest to uncover and reveal the truth about Kurt is mesmerizing and multi-faceted, especially when her supposed reality is turned inside out and her kitchen-door world begins looking much, much safer than her actual life. Maria Dong’s debut novel is a tremendous achievement of both suspense and empathy. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a deeper, more nuanced look at the intersection between mental illness and crime thriller, or for anyone just looking for a truly terrific read.