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A review by liralen
Tell Me No Lies by Andrea Contos
3.0
My kind of YA thriller—the sort that is actually dark and does not get derailed in the interest of instalove and summer romance and so on.
The timeline here is a bit fussy: Nora's sections are, effectively, before, while Sophie's sections are after. They're not labelled as such, and although the voices are distinctly different I found myself flipping back to confirm whose chapter was whose and thus what time frame we were in. It makes sense—they're both hiding things, and a purely chronological narrative would be difficult if not impossible to pull off in the same way.
Overall I found this gripping but a bit convoluted. I love how different Nora and Sophie are, that in some ways they don't understand each other at all but in other ways they get each other in ways that nobody else can. I love that things get messy, and not everything ends happily. At the same time, I'm pretty sure I'd have to draw myself a diagram to fully understand what happens over the course of the book, and why everyone is involved in the ways that they are.
Hopefully Contos keeps it up, because it's nice to see this level of grim in YA.
The timeline here is a bit fussy: Nora's sections are, effectively, before, while Sophie's sections are after. They're not labelled as such, and although the voices are distinctly different I found myself flipping back to confirm whose chapter was whose and thus what time frame we were in. It makes sense—they're both hiding things, and a purely chronological narrative would be difficult if not impossible to pull off in the same way.
Overall I found this gripping but a bit convoluted. I love how different Nora and Sophie are, that in some ways they don't understand each other at all but in other ways they get each other in ways that nobody else can. I love that things get messy, and not everything ends happily. At the same time, I'm pretty sure I'd have to draw myself a diagram to fully understand what happens over the course of the book, and why everyone is involved in the ways that they are.
Hopefully Contos keeps it up, because it's nice to see this level of grim in YA.