One of Us Is Lying *Contains Spoilers*
This review contains spoilers. If you would like to read my spoiler-free review, please check out my GoodReads.
Trigger warning: suicide/depression, violence
Prior to reading One of Us Is Lying, I noticed many people referred to it as a mashup of Pretty Little Liars and The Breakfast Club and I think they nailed it. The primary group of characters consists of your stereotypical teen groupings: a jock, the bad boy, the brain, and the princess. In this instance, Simon is a depressed, twisted basket case. And there’s the twisty murder mystery with adults unable or unwilling to help as is familiar from Pretty Little Liars.
I usually avoid YA as teenage angst is not something I enjoy reading about. I didn’t enjoy experiencing it and it’s certainly not something I like revisiting in literature. If angst is really not your thing, maybe this isn’t the book for you. Angst is on nearly every page. However, I was able to get past it and took the book for the mystery and relationships buried in the angst. There is a lot going on here between the characters’ relationships with each other, family members, and within themselves. Karen McManus does an excellent job capturing that turmoil without coming off as trite. I was pleasantly surprised by the complexity involved in the murder mystery at the center of the book.
Based on prior experiences with YA murder mysteries, I was expecting this to be purely superficial, uncomplicated, and easily resolved. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, particularly in YA where there’s a wide range of ages and comprehension skills in the intended audience, but this was surprising deep and well thought out. Of course there were certain situations leading up to the climax that raised some questions as to why Simon was able to disrupt so many lives in the manner he did without adult intervention or various forms of peer pressure, but I tried to suspend these lines of questioning to just enjoy the story.
Have you read others of McManus’s books? I’m hoping to add One of Us Is Next to my TBR in the next couple months.
I read One of Us Is Lying on my kindle and iPhone through the Libby app.
One of Us Is Lying is available in English and Spanish on Bookshop.org. Purchases made through Bookshop.org support local booksellers.
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