Never Have I Ever: Lying Game, #2 -- Sara Shepard
Quick recap: Sutton Mercer is dead. Unbeknownst to everyone but her murderer, her long-lost secret twin sister, Emma, has taken her place.
No murder, no crime.
Emma is stuck juggling some hot potatoes:
- She has to pass as Sutton or else Sutton's murderer will kill her next, which means that...
- ...she has pretend to be a Popular Queen Bee Mean Girl, which doesn't come naturally to her...
- ...while investigating the murder without alerting the murderer to the fact that she's investigating it...
- ...and carrying on a Secret Romance with a guy that Sutton would have never gotten involved with in the first place.
In this installment, Emma discovers that Lili and Gabby, the air-headed Twitter Twins, had a serious grudge against Sutton. That, coupled with their totally suspicious behavior, has landed them at the top of her suspect list...
Fun follow-up to the original. I've gotten past my suspension-of-disbelief problem—I still maintain that Emma would be able to prove her identity pretty easily if she really wanted to, but I'm less annoyed by that now that she's not actively "trying" to do it anymore—so now, I'm just enjoying the ride.
Ghost Sutton's narration is a lot of fun for a few reasons: first, she's growing as a person because her perspective is so different now; second, while she doesn't remember who killed her, she occasionally has flashbacks to the days before, allowing her to carry on her own version of the investigation; and third, her role as watcher results in her occasionally acting like she's watching a movie, and yelling things like, "NOOOOOOOOOO! EMMA, DON'T GO IN THERE!" (<--not a direct quote, but you get the idea) and headdesking as Emma and Ethan almost kiss again and again.
As I read a good number of the Pretty Little Liars books, I'm familiar with the Sara Shepard formula, which goes something like: Heroine suspects someone for the whole book, s/he turns out to be a red herring, new suspect turns up on the last page. So, as this is only the second book in the series, I wasn't particularly surprised by the outcome of the Twitter Twins investigation.
What I was surprised by was how much I genuinely liked the Twitter Twins by the end.
And by how much I'm looking forward to Book Three.
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Book source: ILLed through my library.