Love Pretty Little Liars? Try A Lovely Lie
Love Pretty Little Liars? Try A Lovely Lie by Jaime Lynn Hendricks. Have you checked out this post on on Books Like Pretty Little Liars for adults? Looking for What to Read After YA?lThis twisty book has a lot of the things we love about PLL!
Love Pretty Little Liars? Try a Lovely Lie
A Lovely Lie by Jaime Lynn Hendricks: Overview
- Adult title published on May 28, 2024 by Scarlet Books
- 312 pages
- It’s on my list of Books Like Pretty Little Liars for Adults
- It’s a perfect answer to What to Read After YA
- It’s also a Friend Group Thriller
A Lovely Lie by Jamie Hendricks: Summary and Analysis
A Lovely Lie by Jamie Lynn Hendricks has a past/present format that looks at how a tragic 1999 accident affected a group of friends in the present.
The reason this is a great “What to Read After YA” book is that the entry point into the story is that Zoey, the child of one of the 1999 friends, has dreams of being an investigative journalist. She finds a letter from her mom to one of the other friends and decides to find out a) who her father is and b) what happened on the night of the senior picnic, a night that left two of their friends and classmates dead.
The book alternates between Zoey’s investigation and epistolary transcripts of the 1999 gang being interviewed by the police. Of course they close ranks and zip their lips!
So the PLL vibes are obvious, and in fact, the plot of this feels a bit like Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, which also has a past/present format that follows a group of students in the present who are reckoning with something terrible their parents were involve with in 1999.
There is also a very specific PLL: Original Sin plot point that is also in A Lovely Lie but since it’s a spoiler, I will keep my lips zipped.
Finally, I felt like in Pretty Little Liars (or any fast-paced show) ALL the possible romantic character pairings happen at some point and this group of friends was very … fluid in their romantic pairings.
Reader opinion is split on this:
- Some readers find it too YA. And for me, this book DID feel a little too YA to be a satisfying adult thriller.
- Other readers have found it a “fast and fun” read, which I agree with! It was very plot-driven and I wished for a little more character development.
But A Lovely Lie really is a perfect “bridge” book for those readers who aren’t vibing with current YA books and want a new book that feels like old school 2010s YA.
It even has one of those Oxymoron titles that were SO popular in YA:
- Cruel Beauty
- A Great and Terrible Beauty
- A Darkness Strange and Lovely
- Delicate Monsters
- Monstrous Beauty
If you check this out or want to, leave me a comment!
