Started: April 2, 2018
Finished: April 9, 2018
Rating: 4.5 stars
Summary: 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?
This novel has been on my TBR since it came out last year, and I’m so glad that I finally got to read it.
When I started reading it, I was really scared that I had hyped this book up too much in my head and it was going to turn out to be terrible. Turns out, I didn’t have to worry because this book lived up to the hype.
I get really nervous when anything is marketed as Pretty Little Liars meets something else because PLL became such a big hit and sensation that marketing teams can put that on any mystery/suspense book just to get customers to pick it up.
I feel like One of Us Is Lying actually deserved that tagline.
The first thing that stood out to me was the flow of this book. The different points of view had very distinct voices. I could tell Bronwyn apart from Addy and I could tell Cooper apart from Nate. It wasn’t only that I could tell a difference in the gender of the character, I could actually tell the different girls apart and the different boys apart. There aren’t many novels where I feel that the multiple POV model works well with, but this one was one where I felt that it did work.
After the POVs, the story itself really stood out to me. I’ve read a lot of YA mystery/suspense, and none of them really took me by surprise like this one. The “whodunit” story is growing to be an overused trope in YA lit (and all lit, if I’m being honest), but the “whodunit” in this one took me completely by surprise. I didn’t suspect it, and I didn’t have a guess for nearly the whole book about who actually killed Simon.
Finally, I found myself getting really attached to the characters. I’m having trouble deciding who my favorite character is because I loved all of them so much. Their dynamic with each other was interesting, and there wasn’t a POV that I just could not stand to read.
The character development was also amazing. Addy stood out the most to me in terms of character development, but all of the characters changed so much over the course of the book, and it happened so subtly that it was so interesting to watch the characters make decisions that they wouldn’t have made at the beginning of the novel.
Overall, this novel was a really interesting read, and I don’t really have any complaints about it. I highly recommend it if you want a really engaging YA suspense novel to read.
P.S. Bronwyn/Nate is one of my forever OTPs now, thank you, goodbye.
Thanks for reading!
Reviews by Hannah 