One Of Us Is Lying | Book Review

Title: One Of Us Is Lying

Author: Karen M. McManus

Genre: YA, Mystery 

Summary: A group of nonfriends straight out of The Breakfast Club is in a detention room as the outcast of the group mysteriously dies. Cue "whodunit" plot.

Rating: 3 trope-y eye-rolls out of 10

Review: I'll admit that what drew me to this book was the fact that it is strangely similar to a book of mine and I was excited to read another author's take on an idea that we've both had. Now, I wish I could take back the decision. Starting off, One Of Us doesn't seem too bad. Sure, the characters are cliches but considering that this is sort-of based on The Breakfast Club, that's not a bad thing. My problems mainly come from the last act of the book.

First, we have a character whose sexuality is used as a plot twist which doesn't particularly bother me in comparison to what happens after. This character is then outed by the police and there are no consequences for that. Another thing that truly upset me is the "depressed people are violent" trope. Say it with me folks: depressed people are more of a threat to themselves than they are to other people. A character with depression decides to help frame other people for murder and another depressed character considers shooting up his high school. Yes, this author thought telling teen readers (many of whom suffer from depression) that they're like the terrorists who kill innocent kids.

The one major person of color in the story is a smart, capable Latina (awesome!) who then falls in love with a drug dealer (racist cliches are the new plain cliches). This wouldn't be too much of an issue if all the guy dealt was marijuana, but he also deals painkillers which can harm people and that truly upsets me. We've got this cool girl with a basic white boy who puts people in harm's way for money and we're supposed to cheer for them? Really? In front of my salad? The gay jock is as one dimensional as this sentence I'm typing. In fact, the only character who seems to have a decent character arc is the straight white girl (hmm... I wonder why she's the only tolerable character in the book... qwhite interesting) who then gets her arc of becoming a badass feminist ruined by needing her ass saved by a boy during the climax of the book.

And finally, the thing that annoyed me the most about the book (spoiler and trigger warning):
There is no killer. The depressed, would-be mass murderer mentioned earlier decides to kill himself and frame a group of kids because he's upset with them. Not only is suicide brushed over in this book, but this is a MYSTERY. Not just any mystery, but a DEATH MYSTERY. You do not write a mystery book and set up all these clues just to have zero payoff with a "gotcha, there is no killer." That's just lazy writing. I feel that the author had a great premise and cool setup (I'm down for anything related to The Breakfast Club) but along the way she got distracted with shoving in as many cliches as possible and telling a story about teens and growing up that she completely neglected the mystery aspect of the plot. We already have a Breakfast Club. If your book claims to take a different spin on a classic story, follow through on whatever that interesting spin is otherwise you're just rehashing what has already been done before.

And for the love of Taylor Swift, don't make light of life-threatening situations that your readers may have found themselves in before. It's 2017. I thought that was publicly known by now.

All in all, One Of Us Is Lying isn't Throne of Trash, Fifty Shades of Shit level horrible, but it completely fails to live up to expectations. If you don't read this, you're not missing the next big thing in YA. Save time and effort. Just rewatch The Breakfast Club.

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Liars, Inc. | Book Review

Title: Liars, Inc.

Author: Paula Stokes

Genre: Mystery, YA

Summary: A student named Max starts a club called Liars, Inc. where he and his friends forge signatures, call in for "sick" kids, and other petty high school stuff. But then, Max is framed for the disappearance for this best friend, Preston and things go from bad to slightly less bad to really bad to ???

Rating: 3/10 stars

Review: 

I'm going to start this review with the things I did not like. First, the character Parvati. While part of me can appreciate a half-Indian love interest/female lead (not something you see in YA fiction a lot), most of me was upset with Parvati's characterization. It wasn't enough to make her a free spirit, which is something that I don't think I would have a problem with. Stokes took it way too far.

My issue comes with her being a lying, scheming, drug abusing manipulator. A South Asian girl being shown as untrustworthy and only starting to gain a conscience when she finds the right Basic White Boy? Come on, now. It's a main point of the story that the characters are all untrustworthy, but I feel that Stokes overdid it with Parvati's character. Max lies to the FBI? Shitty decision but when you're being set up for murder and interrogated, with a criminal record, I can understand why he'd do those things and for his character, it makes sense for him to impulsively do things. If I were in his position, I'd probably make the same dumb choices. With Preston, not to spoil anything, but I get why he did the things he did. It's believable and in line with his characterization. 

But with Parvati, I felt that too much was piled onto her to make her seem too much like a mysterious bad girl, when her smarts and rebellious streak that got her kicked out of her last school would have been more than enough to justify the narrative painting her as untrustworthy and for Max doubting her. Unfortunately, Stokes decided to dump way too much onto Parvati and it turned out messy and insensitive.

There are a pair of twin Korean babies in the story, and they're nowhere near needed for the plot. One's named something or another but the other is named Jo Lee, as in that's her "first name" and her surname is the name of the white people who adopted her. I'm obviously not an expert on Korean culture, but I'm at least eighty percent sure that the name Jo Lee makes no sense as a given name. Lee is a surname. And even if the kid's surname was Lee and her first name was just Jo, her twin would have the same surname, which she does not in the book. Again, I'm not Korean, or even Korean-American, so I could be wrong about this, but if I'm not, that seems a bit like the typical "pick vague names that possibly fit a culture and put them in the book because Western readers won't know the difference" bs that many authors like to pull.

Then there's a part in which a character has green eyes and pale skin and therefore looks ~less Latino~ and :) when :) will :) white :) people :) realize :) that :) they're :) not :) the :) only :) ones :) with :) pale :) eyes :) and skin :) and :) having :) those :) features :) does :) not :) make :) PoC :) any :) less :) of :) members :) of :) their :) own :) race :) :) :)

There's also a part in which Parvati is referred to as looking "otherworldly, like a ghost or a hot alien chick" because yeah, people who aren't 100% white Americans must be ALIENS. You can have a love interest who is a woman of color without using the teenage male narrator to fetishize her and make lowkey racist remarks about her. Hiding behind the character won't excuse your casual racism.

But racist undertones aside, Liars, Inc. is a pretty predictable mystery. There was no point where I slapped my hand over my mouth or gasped aloud. For a book that is advertised to be like Gone Girl and How To Get Away With Murder, clearly you can see why I was disappointed with the mystery plot. I guessed many things early on. As soon as one clue was revealed, I figured out its significance. I kept reading the book because I wanted to be blindsided by something. I wanted Max to actually turn out to be guilty, or for any of my predictions to be completely wrong. A photo of a kid who looks like Preston could turn out to be a photoshopped red herring. All these videos and photographs that were found of Parvati having sex? Perhaps they led to someone getting arrested for child pornography (for real, you can't tell me that F.B.I. agents would just let that slide. I've been binge watching Quantico. Alex Parrish would never let something like that go.) I feel that SOMETHING should have come from nowhere and thrown the reader for a loop, but it never happened.

The book might have benefited from involving Liars, Inc. more. After the first act of the book, the idea is just dropped and only mentioned in passing. I get that there is a mystery happening but I feel that if half the premise is this club, and the book is NAMED after it, there should have been a bigger purpose for it. Like Max said, he would have covered for Preston even if Liars, Inc. didn't exist, so why was it in the book in the first place if the narrative wasn't going to use it for more than a few chapters?

Overall, Liars, Inc. isn't the worst book I've ever read, and it's not the worst YA mystery out there. But with its offensive content and paint-by-numbers plot, it's not anything special. I flew threw it thanks to the short chapters, and while there are worse books to spend time on, I still don't think Liars, Inc. is a must read for YA mystery lovers.

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The Naturals (The Naturals #1) by Jennifer Lynn Barnes | Book Review

Title: The Naturals
Series: The Naturals (Book 1)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Genre: Thriller, Mystery
Summary: It's basically a YA version of Criminal Minds, in which a smart girl named Cassie joins the FBI to help catch serial killers
Rating: 9/10 stars
Review: I'll be honest, I think I know everything. I've read countless novels, I watch Criminal Minds religiously, so when I know how bad guys are caught on that show and I know every trope in fiction, it's rather hard to take me by surprise. Which is why I have to give The Naturals such a high rating. I had figured out who the killer was from their first appearance and for the first time in as far as I can remember, I was wrong about a novels' plot twist. While I was reading The Naturals, I saw myself giving it a 6 or 7 starred rating because I thought it was predictable. However, by the end of the novel, I found myself overlooking the pointless love triangle and one dimensional characters because I enjoyed the last third of the novel so much. The plot was easy to follow, moved fairly quickly (I finished this in just a few days), and the story is a lot of fun. There aren't many young adult novels based around criminal profiling so it's refreshing to read something new and unique. The Naturals does have its problems though. The love triangle, for one, is not needed at all. Michael and Cassie have chemistry as friends but whenever things get romantic it's awkward and I feel like they can't relate to each other very well and that this should just remain a friendship. The romance feels thrown in for cheap tension. Dean and Cassie make a lot more sense together romantically and I hope that by the end of the next book, the love triangle has been squashed and we can stop dedicating pages to it when that page time could be given to developing the characters. I feel like too often characters start to blur together, Lia and Sloane, Briggs and Agent Whatsherface. The characters don't feel distinct enough and it makes it hard to get attached to any of them, to the point where someone was on the floor bleeding to death and I was thinking "what am I going to eat for lunch?" There are still at least three more novels in this series and maybe now that we've gotten the first one out of the way, characters can have room to stretch their legs out a bit (and show off their abilities more).

The Naturals is a little rocky in a few places but manages to stick the landing and make the reader eager for book two, Killer Instinct. This is a solid start to what's sure to be a fun series.

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