The Liar

Read this for a book club or else I wouldn't have bothered to finish it. I was completely frustrated which may be because I think a man chasing a teenager and grabbing her is an assault but the author doesn't think it is! The law must be different in Israel (where the story takes place) bc in most if not all US states, if a grown man, a stranger calls a teenager names then chases her into an alley and grabs her arm, that is assault and battery. These are the facts of what really happened, but supposedly, according to the law there, if she claims she was assaulted she is lying. The plot revolved around this and it drove me crazy bc the man who chased her and grabbed her did do something terribly wrong but no character in the book would acknowledge it. There doesn't seem to be any investigation since witnesses saw her run and the man chase her and seconds later she screamed and authorities appeared. There couldn't have been time for an actual rape. I just didn't understand the entire premise of this book. Isn't it wrong for a grown man to grab a teenager? The victim is "lying"supposedly but how is anyone supposed to know what the intent of the person grabbing her was? I don't now how others feel about this situation but in the USA it is illegal for a grown man to chase a teenager into an alley and grab her arm. Authorities do not have to wait for any actual sexual penetration for his actions to be an illegal assault. Also, the police detective is approached by a man who can barely speak more than once and never even asks if this person needs help, and never tries to find out what the person is desperately trying to tell the officer (that what he witnessed wasn't an assault). There was so much the author could have done with the main character telling a lie. She had every right to be genuinely afraid of a man chasing and grabbing her (but of course no right to lie that she was sexually assaulted but the author NEVER actually spells out what the attacker allegedly did to her sexually.