BookBrowse Reviews We Could Be Anyone by Anna-Marie McLemore

BookBrowse:

A brother and sister make a living conducting Spiritualist hoaxes, but the tables are turned when they discover a real mystery at The Coterie.

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For access to our digital magazine, free books,and other benefits, become a member today.

As soon as I finished We Could Be Anyone I grabbed my phone to text three friends who love YA fantasy. "You will love this. Trust me," I wrote to each. One asked what it was about: "A brother and sister stage fake hauntings at fancy hotels and then get paid to cleanse the building of ghosts. They read a lot of Ovid, and the brother is closeted, and the sister is turning into a tree." She replied with one word: "Ordered." While the plot drew me in, I breezed through the book because of its smart pacing and how much I came to care about the characters.

Granted, We Could Be Anyone unites a lot of my particular personal interests. I love Spiritualist history, with all of its fake ectoplasm and melodramatic seances. I love hoaxes. And I love when someone is exploiting the super-rich. In the book, Lisandro and Lola schedule Spiritualist demonstrations at posh hotels and stage hauntings in the weeks leading up to them. Lola, in ghost makeup, makes eerie appearances, enhanced by mirrors, fake blood packets, and other props. (One of my favorite parts was reading about the special effects.) In the demonstration, Lisandro "channels" her to appear, and the hotel management is then all too eager to pay him to make her go away. The book opens as they prepare to haunt The Coterie, where they soon find a real mystery—one they have to trust outsiders to help them solve.

I really loved the complexity of the characters. Lisandro and Lola can be utterly shameless in manipulating people in their acts, even stealing from the hotels and their wealthy guests. Yet, they have some hard ethical lines, such as never using their act to take advantage of the bereaved. Early on, it's clear that this rule is somehow tied to the deaths of their parents three years prior, when Lola was 13 and Lisandro 14, a story that is slowly unraveled for the reader. Even as we see how close and clever the siblings needed to be in order to survive, they reveal themselves as individuals through their personal obstacles, like Lisandro reckoning with his homosexuality and Lola with becoming a tree.

There's clearly a lot going on in this book, plot-wise. While it seems like the many story elements could be chaotic, Anna-Marie McLemore's deft prose style means everything stays balanced. There isn't a lot of filler or info dumping to make the book more complex or challenging. Instead, there is an immediacy to the luscious language, ripe with sensory details that will pique the interest of goths of any age: "In an upholstered chair sat a woman, her milk-pale hands resting on the brocade arms. The satin of her dress was the exact shade of absinthe lit by a flaming sugar cube. No, brighter."

Snarky comments about the rich guests are especially hilarious, like this description of women arguing over perfume. "Otherwise well-bred young ladies tearing each other's hair out over which signature scent belongs to whom. Gwin laid her claim to verbena with the ferocity of a mother bear, and Francine was willing to fight to the death over Parma violet."

I was surprised to learn that Lola was turning into a tree. Not just because it's unusual, but because it seems like a thematic mismatch for the novel, which mostly takes place inside The Coterie, rather than in any kind of nature setting. While the author uses the tree imagery beautifully, it still felt like an odd choice.

I read this YA novel as a middle-aged woman who has taken a lot of writing workshops. There were moments at which I asked those workshop sorts of questions, like, "Why now? Why do they risk so much now, of all times?" or, "This dialogue is pretty, but does it sound natural?" When I imagined having read this as a teen, though, I realized I would not have asked those questions. In fact, I would have loved the dialogue. In one scene, Lisandro asks a young man why he'd hoped to see him again. The character's response begins, "When we see the stars, we're seeing light from thousands of years ago," as if it's only natural that the question would call for a treatise on energy and matter.

For '90s kids like me who watched Pump Up the Volume, wanted to believe like Fox Mulder, and clung to Prozac Nation like a life manual, the idea of meeting other misfits is still magical. I want someone to talk to me about stars and molecules, and it took this book to remind me of that need to escape. As Lola and Lisandro have to trust each other, as well as some members of the hotel staff, the book perfectly embodies the trope of the ragtag band of outsiders coming together as a team to accomplish something. It's inspiring to think of today's young misfits finding themselves in books like this.

This review first ran in the June 24, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.