Take a photo of a barcode or cover
jen188805 's review for:
Beautiful Lies
by Jessica Warman
This book was infuriating. I admit that the general plot was intriguing, and I did keep reading (or skimming at points) to find out how it ended... which made it that much worse that the ending did not make sense.
But then again, logic seemed to be missing from the entire story, which was my biggest complaint. None of the characters behaved in a reasonable manner, and that muddled the mystery of it. Parental figures that overlook a huge gash to the head and simply advise to take a shower and clean the blood off. Friends, family and neighbors who pay little to no attention to aberrant behavior of a teenage girl. Everyone seems to just dismiss Alice as a troublemaker, though it seems to mostly be because she stays out late and spends a lot of time with a sketchy boyfriend. But people are keeping so little tabs on her it hardly matters when she disappears. There is little concern from her aunt and uncle and even police don't seem to care.
There were too many things going on here: the mystery of a missing sister, the weird connection between the twins, the unreliable narrator (hallucinating? on drugs? crazy?), and not enough to ground the story.
Plus any book that has to express multiple conversations between characters with:
"..."
"..."
loses my vote entirely. This combined with the errors in logic and plot makes it feel like it was self-published or poorly edited.
But then again, logic seemed to be missing from the entire story, which was my biggest complaint. None of the characters behaved in a reasonable manner, and that muddled the mystery of it. Parental figures that overlook a huge gash to the head and simply advise to take a shower and clean the blood off. Friends, family and neighbors who pay little to no attention to aberrant behavior of a teenage girl. Everyone seems to just dismiss Alice as a troublemaker, though it seems to mostly be because she stays out late and spends a lot of time with a sketchy boyfriend. But people are keeping so little tabs on her it hardly matters when she disappears. There is little concern from her aunt and uncle and even police don't seem to care.
There were too many things going on here: the mystery of a missing sister, the weird connection between the twins, the unreliable narrator (hallucinating? on drugs? crazy?), and not enough to ground the story.
Plus any book that has to express multiple conversations between characters with:
"..."
"..."
loses my vote entirely. This combined with the errors in logic and plot makes it feel like it was self-published or poorly edited.