Saturday, August 13, 2011

Never Have I Ever (The Lying Game) ~ Sara Shepard review

Never Have I Ever (The Lying Game #2)
HarperTeen
August 2, 2011
320 pages

*contains spoilers for The Lying Game (#1) - my review*
This review is being posted today (and wasn't earlier in this month) because The Lying Game TV series premieres on ABC Family on Monday, August 15 at 9/8c (and repeated at 10/9c)



Never Have I Ever
by Sara Shepard is the second in Shepard's new 'The Lying Game' series. Emma is still living in her long-lost (and now dead) twin sister Sutton Mercer's home. Eating Sutton's food, sleeping in Sutton's bed, wearing Sutton's clothes . . . calling Sutton's parents Mom and Dad, answering to the name 'Sutton,' pretending to be Sutton.

It's Goldilocks to the extreme. Only Emma, one new friend, and Sutton's killer know that Emma is not really Sutton. And that's Emma's goal, to find out who killed Sutton . . . while keeping herself alive.


It seems like it would be easy for a teenage girl to figure out which of her now dead sister's friends or acquaintances would have killed her, but not so much with Emma and Sutton. Sutton and her friends enjoyed playing the Lying Game - pulling unbelievably dangerous pranks on each other that quite often looked like murder attempts and all could have left someone angry enough to kill.

Now, Emma has to figure out who it is leaving her the notes telling her to keep pretending to be Sutton 'or else,' who was really angry with Sutton, and where everyone was the last night Sutton was alive.

Slowly she tries to clear everyone's name and avoid danger.

The Lying Game series is a lot like Pretty Little Liars in that there's a disappearance that there's a murder that needs solving and readers get a little bit of the puzzle each book. A little bit less than you think you're going to get, actually, because at the end things are revealed to have one more twist that means things aren't quite solved yet.

But you still want to keep coming back for more and more because they're so much fun. Both series are truly thrilling mysteries.

Never Have I Ever is actually narrated in the first person by Sutton (who is the I) but with Emma doing things so there's lots of 'I remembered [......] after seeing Emma say [....]' It gets kind of confusing sometimes with the almost dual narrators. To have Sutton as the 'I' but Emma as really the main character who is also talking a lot about Sutton ... After a while, however, you get used to it (or, at least, I did).

I, of course, wish more had been revealed in this book, but that's just because I really want to know what happened! I'm really happy that the next book is coming out in February - which is not too far away.

8/10




Thank you to Harper for my copy of this book

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