Title: One of us is lying
Author: Karen M. McManus
Publisher: Penguin Random House Children’s UK
Pages: 368
Genre: Crime, Drama
My Rating: 7.5/10
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One of us is lying
Five people are in detention, 4 of them make it out alive. The fifth, Simon, died because of peanut oil while he has a peanut allergy. The police immediately are asking the 4 what happened and eventually, they think that one of them killed Simon. Bronwyn is the smart one and gets all the A’s in high school and she wants to go to Yale. Addy is the popular girl in high school and is dating Jake. Cooper is the top player in the school’s team and Nate is known for his drug dealing and other offences. They all have two things in common. First, they were all there when Simon died in detention. Second, they all had a huge secret. And guess what? Simon knew those secrets and was about to post them on his self made app ‘About That’. Did one of these four kill Simon or was it someone else who hated Simon because of what he wrote on his app?
Review
I read this book two years ago and when I saw on Netflix they were making this into a series, I knew I had to reread it. Because I hadn’t written a review about this book back then. I write reviews so I can look back on what exactly happened in those books and if I liked it or not. But I forgot most of the things, except the one who killed Simon. I remembered that.
This book reminded me of Pretty Little Liars and I think the series can be the new series that PLL fans can watch. It has the same energy. Something happened and the four have their secrets. But in this case, you find out who killed Simon at the end of the first book. I believe there are more books in this series, so I wonder what those books are about. Or maybe they are about different people. Maybe I should check them out. I still haven’t read those books. Not sure why, because I liked this book.
Even though the main characters had their dirty secrets, I still was rooting for them. I had the feeling that they did not do anything wrong. Even though I had to reread this book, I forgot about most of the things that happened. Which was nice because that makes it more exciting to read it again. The ending of this book was really good and the plot twist was so good.
The writing style is nice and while I read romance most of the time, it was nice to read something else this time. The thing I liked about these kinds of books the most is that you can try and guess who the killer was. I wonder if I got it right who the killer was when I read this book for the first time. Sometimes it is pretty obvious who did it. But this book is different. I think it is harder to figure out who did it. Which makes it more fun in my opinion. The shock when you realize someone else did it is one of my favourite moments of a book (or movie/series).
I am hoping that the series is just as good as the book. A lot of the time they change the details and sometimes that is fine. But if you read the book first, it will be annoying if they changed things up a bit.
Update: I’ve watched episodes of the Netflix series and they changed a lot of things. They changed most of the details. In this case, I would say ‘read the book’ because I liked that story better (so far). But it can be pretty confusing when you are going to watch the series when you also want to read the book. It feels like two different stories, but with the same characters.