Review: The Lying Game by Sara Shepard

Title: The Lying Game
Author: Sara Shepard
Publisher: HarperTeen
Release date: December 7th 2010
Pages: 307
Genre: Young Adult mystery
Source: Bought
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I had a life anyone would kill for.Then someone did.
The worst part of being dead is that there's nothing left to live for. No more kisses. No more secrets. No more gossip. It's enough to kill a girl all over again. But I'm about to get something no one else does--an encore performance, thanks to Emma, the long-lost twin sister I never even got to meet.
Now Emma's desperate to know what happened to me. And the only way to figure it out is to be me--to slip into my old life and piece it all together. But can she laugh at inside jokes with my best friends? Convince my boyfriend she's the girl he fell in love with? Pretend to be a happy, carefree daughter when she hugs my parents goodnight? And can she keep up the charade, even after she realizes my murderer is watching her every move?

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars 

Since I've been such a bad reader lately, rarely making the time to finish a book quickly enough to get emotionally invested and to properly enjoy it, I figured I could read something like The Lying Game. I figured that this book, like the Pretty Little Liars series, would a be a quick, entertaining read without much thinking required from the reader. And that's exactly what I got - The Lying Game is not a great, meaningful piece of literature, but it kept me entertained throughout.

The concept for The Lying Game is, to be honest, kind of crazy. And I'm still not sure whether that's the good kind of crazy or the bad kind of crazy - it's just crazy. It's completely unrealistic and way more out there than the stuff I normally read. And in the beginning, I had some trouble with that. Having a dead girl narrate the book, but also tell us the thoughts of the other main character got kind of confusing. In the beginning, I kept having to check to make sure I knew which twin was which and who was talking. There were a lot of little things that didn't make all that much sense to me, like why Sutton remembers some things but not others - that seemed very constructed to me, very fitted to what the reader was supposed to know and what not. Then again, I can't judge whether something like that makes sense, since I don't know how the whole thing is going to turn out. And after a while, I decided to stop caring, and I got used to the confusing-ness, so I really liked the weird, original idea for the novel.

As was to be expected, the writing is not exactly great. It's not terrible, but it is very basic. But I guess it just fits the superficial tone of the novel. There were parts when the superficial stuff bugged me - almost all the characters are incredibly shallow and vain, and a lot of the consumerist stuff bugged me. Then again, it's not like I was expecting anything else - that's how the Pretty Little Liars books are, too, and most books like this, really.

The mystery is okay. It's not badly done, and it did keep me entertained. But I never got too invested in the whole case. Knowing there were going to be a million plot twists and many more books before we'd find out who the real murderer is, I didn't even try to guess who it could have been. It didn't take much from my enjoyment of the novel, though.

But, really, none of that even mattered. There's just something about Sara Shepard's style that makes the novel read so quickly; you can't help but flip the pages. The Lying Game is pure fun, fun, fun. It didn't impress me, but it didn't disappoint either - it's exactly the quick, entertaining read I was hoping for.