Review: The Truth According to Ember

The Truth According to Ember by Danica Nava
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review 

“I’m pretty sure this is a bad idea.” 

The Truth According Ember was a story of what can happen when all those little white lies you told start to add up. Ember is twenty-five years old living paycheck to paycheck after her younger brother skipped out on bail and she lost the money she had saved to continue her college classes. After not even receiving a call for an interview after the umpteenth job application, she and her bestfriend Joanna come up with the idea to check the Caucasian box instead of the Native American one and fudge her credentials a tad bit. Lo and behold, she gets called in for an interview, lands the job and even finds herself soon promoted. However, the lies are starting to snowball and that little interoffice HR rule about not allowing romances, seems more like a suggestion when Ember and the IT guy Danuwoa have chemistry impossible to ignore. 

I was just Ember Lee Cardinal, a sometimes liar, but mostly an overall good person. 

This was all told from Ember's pov and in a way that readers are on her running thoughts ride, this isn't typically my personal favorite writing style. I started to feel it lead to overly describing on focuses I didn't care about anymore and thought paced in a way I started to find exhausting, if this style doesn't bother you, though, your mileage will vary greatly from mine. I also thought this had more of a New Adult chik-lit feel but for Ember being twenty-five, all of her pop culture references felt pretty dated (yes, I know about those quirky youngin's that love older movies (Say Anything) but all the references were like this). For the most part, Ember is a character you're going to root for, even when some of her white lies will start to have you stressed out and yelling for her to stop. Starting from a place unprivileged, she tries to out play a system that wants to keep her locked out of it. There's definitely confronting racism, sexism, and nepotism moments in this. 

Being caught kissing him in front of the CEO’s nephew was the absolute worst thing that could ever happen. 

Danuwoa comes into the picture pretty early, they have one of those relationships where Ember's always somehow embarrassing herself in front of him and telling him obvious lies to make herself look better (she's borrowing the car, not the owner of a 1996 holding on by a thread Toyota). Even though we don't get his pov, it's easy to read that he likes her and, mostly, finds her obvious lies amusing. However, I found the romance fairly weak, this is more Ember's new adult, coming into my own, slice of life story. For the vast majority of the story, Danuwoa is a paper doll, it's not until around 70% that we get a deeper look at his character and background, he has a younger sister he cares for because his parents died. He's the acts perfect, looks perfect interest for the heroine that I, personally, didn't find had much substance to his character make-up. They go on a work trip where suddenly, there's only one bed!, and we get a feeling required hot bedroom scene and from there you'll get all the buzz and bullet point words and phrases that stands in for emotional depth romance. 

This all started because I just wanted to be an accountant, damn it. 

The latter half is about Ember talking about how important this job is to her and thinking about how that HR rule about not dating could ruin things but inviting Danuwoa up to her floor for a hot quickie because her boss is supposed to be gone an hour, it just didn't fit right and felt ignore previous character building in favor of hot scene, so I guess, again mileage may vary. Danuwoa also proclaims once how important the job is to him but he's more of the “doesn't want to be a dirty secret” and wants to just come clean to HR. It, of course, all blows up in Ember's face, the romance and job lies, and we get Ember learning some life lessons and what she really wants out of life. 

There's some family life issues going on for Ember, relationship with her brother, father, and community that I enjoyed, I found myself wishing this just would have been made a contemporary fiction coming of age and left out trying to add enough romance to get a romance tag. The relationship between Ember and who became a bit of a work mentor, Natalie, was one of my favorite relationships in the book, that friendship would have been great to see grow. Also, Ember learning to ask for help from her community and getting a talking to from her Auntie felt like it could have been a great heart of the story. 

The writing style of riding Ember's thoughts, created a pace I started to find exhausting and along with a romance I didn't find myself invested in, had this not hitting the right mark for me but I also think there was some great coming of age and cultural issues threaded into here that definitely hit right.

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