SYNOPSIS:
Pay close attention and you might solve this.
On Monday afternoon, five students at Bayview High walk into detention.
Bronwyn, the brain, is Yale-bound and never breaks a rule.
Addy, the beauty, is the picture-perfect homecoming princess.
Nate, the criminal, is already on probation for dealing.
Cooper, the athlete, is the all-star baseball pitcher.
And Simon, the outcast, is the creator of Bayview High’s notorious gossip app.
Only, Simon never makes it out of that classroom. Before the end of detention Simon’s dead. And according to investigators, his death wasn’t an accident. On Monday, he died. But on Tuesday, he’d planned to post juicy reveals about all four of his high-profile classmates, which makes all four of them suspects in his murder. Or are they the perfect patsies for a killer who’s still on the loose?
Everyone has secrets, right? What really matters is how far you would go to protect them.
REVIEW:
I’m not sure if I’m completely past the YA trend or if I have perhaps chosen the wrong book to immerse myself again in this genre. There was actually nothing wrong with the story or with the characters, the plot was interesting enough and the pace perfectly balanced. But somehow, despite all the good things about the book, the overall feeling that I’m left with is just… meh. Ok. Not bad, not great either. I didn’t feel the urge to devour the book in one seating, I didn’t get attached to any of the characters and I didn’t have that addictive feeling that WOW books create.
I love psychological thrillers, mystery novels, I (used to?) love Young Adult books, so I was expecting that the combination of all of these would blow my mind. It… very much didn’t. But in the same time, it was an enjoyable and pretty surprising read. Both from the plot and mystery perspective, but mostly, from the way the characters were built. I keep hearing lately that the present generation of kids and teenagers are… well.. different than the previous ones were. That they are kinder, more emphathetic, more supportive to one another. That schools nowdays are seeing less bullying, less teasing or looking down, less “Mean Girls” vibes. And One Of Us Is Lying is, I think, the first book that I read that shows us exactly that face of today’s teenagers. Of course, it’s a fantasy work, but it’s overlapping perfectly over the image that media is portraying in reality about Gen Z. I actually googled the author’s age, thinking that perhaps she’s part of this generation, that’s how realistic this aspect seemed. Yes, there are, obviously, some bad apples between the secondary characters, but the main ones surprise you by how kind and understanding they are to each other and to everyone around them.
Light and mildly entertaining. That’s how I would describe the book. Not memorable, but probably enjoyable enough to make me read the second book in the series at some point. I was hoping it would make me turn back to YA books with the same fervor that I was reading those a few years back, but it doesn’t seem like it was a lucky draw.
My Weekly Book 