Book Review

Pretty Bad Liars?

IMG_20180803_174340_674.jpg

All of this is true by Lygia Day Peñaflor

Miri, Penny and Soleil have been friends since seventh grade, attending the same classes at the same private school, looking at the same boys, arranging the same hyped parties, and most important of all, sharing the love for the novel Undertow, and worshipping its author. One day the girls, together with their new friend Jonah, goes to an Undertow-signing. The author, Fatima Ro, is everything they hoped she would be, and as if that wasn’t enough, she want’s the little high school gang to become “her new people”. Hanging out at Fatima’s soon becomes the new normal, but all relationships isn’t what they first seems to be, and conflicts, lies, and hidden agendas are boiling right under the surface. It all comes down to the question: Who can you really trust to keep your secrets?

Rating 🐖🐖🐖

This is exactly the kind of page turning mystery story that I do l.o.v.e. It’s similar to Pretty Little Liars and a lot of other YA-books, with the plot building up around a well-kept secret that you spend the time reading to try to figure out. In All of this is true, this premise also shines through in how the book is disposed and written. It consists exclusively of TV-interviews with the girls, excerpts from Fatima Ro’s new book, email-conversations, and news paper articles about the unraveling scandal that’s at the center of the story.

I strongly liked this disposition, as it added to the jigsaw format of the plot itself. What I didn’t like was that the book felt a bit thin. Not in size or number of pages, but  plot wise. After all, the “big secret” in this one was quite easy to figure out, and once it was exposed, there wasn’t much more to the story.

This book could easily have been a five pigs-read for me, if there had been just a liiiittle more dept; to the characters, and to the events that took place, i.e. in terms of psychological explanations or theories. ‘Cause at the end of this books, all my “how’s” were answered, but all my “why’s” where just left there hanging. And that’s really like ripping out the last chapter of a really good thriller, isn’t it?

Dr. Bea approves

If you want more mysteries, I recommend you to read One of us is lying by Karen M. McManus. (Moral wise I had some troubles with that one, to be honest, but oh was it an exciting five pig-read.)

One thought on “Pretty Bad Liars?”

Fill this sky with stars...