Fans of Ally Carter, especially her Heist Society readers, will love this teen mystery/thriller with sarcastic wit, a hint of romance, and Ocean’s Eleven–inspired action.
Julep Dupree tells lies. A lot of them. She’s a con artist, a master of disguise, and a sophomore at Chicago’s swanky St. Agatha High, where her father, an old-school grifter with a weakness for the ponies, sends her to so she can learn to mingle with the upper crust. For extra spending money Julep doesn’t rely on her dad—she runs petty scams for her classmates while dodging the dean of students and maintaining an A+ (okay, A-) average.
But when she comes home one day to a ransacked apartment and her father gone, Julep’s carefully laid plans for an expenses-paid golden ticket to Yale start to unravel. Even with help from St. Agatha’s resident Prince Charming, Tyler Richland, and her loyal hacker sidekick, Sam, Julep struggles to trace her dad’s trail of clues through a maze of creepy stalkers, hit attempts, family secrets, and worse, the threat of foster care. With everything she has at stake, Julep’s in way over her head . . . but that’s not going to stop her from using every trick in the book to find her dad before his mark finds her. Because that would be criminal.
Rating: 2/5 Stars
Trust Me, I’m
Lying brought me back to childhood.
When we
were little, my cousins and I used to play a lot at “Spies” which meant we
would spend the day hiding or running in the backyard pretending to be hiding
from other spies, or we would grab the phone and set it in front of the TV,
pressing arbitrary numbers and pretending it was a computer (and running the
hell away when grandma saw that we had disconnected her phone).
We were
pretty much amazing, if I’m honest. I mean, no kid will fantasize about being an
“ok” spy! So yes, we were (despite logic or reason) the absolutely best and
most amazing spies that had ever graced this Earth.
Trust Me, I’m
Lying is pretty much exactly that, except that I wasn’t looking for a childish
fantasy but more of a criminal/mystery book with real characters and with real
capabilities.
I think the
problems begin with the summary, it’s deceptive:
Fans of Ally
Carter, especially her Heist Society readers, will love this teen
mystery/thriller with sarcastic wit, a hint of romance, and Ocean’s Eleven–inspired
action.
I haven’t read any book from Ally Carter, so I really
don’t know about that but this it’s where it gets deceiving:
“, a hint of
romance”
If by a hint you mean the entire plot of the book,
then yes! It’s like when you are watching a cooking show and they go “Just a
pinch of salt” and the Chefs basically turn the soup into the Dead Sea.
Then there is:
“and Ocean’s
Eleven–inspired
action.”
First, there isn’t even a hint of Ocean’s Eleven, and
second what action??! One of my main problems with this book was just how
boring it was, nothing happens up until 70% and even then I still didn’t care.
Julep Dupree is a con artist just like her dad, but
she’s tired of that life. That’s why she goes to a prestigious high school
filled with the children of the rich and powerful, so she can make connections
and someday go to Yale. But when her father goes missing, Julep will spend her
time crushing on the hottest guy at school that never paid her any mind to her
up until then, doing stupid shit that would have gotten her killed if this were
real life and occasionally remembering her father.
I wasn’t a fan of the book as you can see. When I’m
reading I want to be convinced that it’s real, but instead of the book showing
me how Julep was the best, it just hit me over the head over and over with how
amazing she was supposed to be, when in fact, she’s pretty clueless and lacks
common sense:
·
Doesn’t realize that her best friend
is in love with her (or even that he had a crush on someone) even though she
claims that she’s the best at reading people.
- She trusts Tyler, the popular guy at school that suddenly pays attention to her when her father goes missing.
- She takes said guy to her father’s bookie, revealing that her father is missing (and she could end up in foster care), and putting them both at risk of being killed.
- Doesn’t know how to avoid/identify someone following her because “the best con artists never get caught”.
- She confronts the guy following her in an empty alley, making it easy for the guy to kill/assault her.
- She trusts what everybody says with little thought, even though she knows how easy it is to trick people.
- For someone who is the best Julep gets caught all the time.
- They are being chased by someone who tries to kill them by taking them off the road and she wants to stop the car to “talk it through” with the wanna be assassin.
- Another thing, the head master of her school has confidential information about her and her family, things Julep doesn’t even know about and she doesn’t find that strange?
- Julep is “careful” not to get caught in her schemes by the head master or else she’ll be expelled, and yet everybody in town knows what she does!
- This it’s not about Julep but more about the logic of the book. Her best friend Sam is great with computers. However, he has problems creating a web page (and has been working on it for weeks apparently) but in a couple of hours he’s able to hack the FBI’s data base.
It was pretty dumb and annoying. The love story
overtakes any plot there might have been and the reason behind her father’s disappearance
was boring. Him being gone was the main plot, the author could have made it
interesting, instead she chose the blandest result she could come up with.
I would recommend this to people who don’t mind things
not making sense and a great focus on Insta-love.
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