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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Sep 2017, 288 pages
Paperback:
May 2019, 288 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Michelle Anya Anjirbag
Buy This Book
From the author of the unforgettable New York Times bestseller We Were Liars comes a masterful new psychological suspense novel - the story of a young woman whose diabolical smarts are her ticket into a charmed life. But how many times can someone reinvent themselves? You be the judge.
Imogen is a runaway heiress, an orphan, a cook, and a cheat.
Jule is a fighter, a social chameleon, and an athlete.
An intense friendship. A disappearance. A murder, or maybe two.
A bad romance, or maybe three.
Blunt objects, disguises, blood, and chocolate. The American dream, superheroes, spies, and villains.
A girl who refuses to give people what they want from her.
A girl who refuses to be the person she once was.
Excerpt
Genuine Fraud
It was a bloody great hotel.
The minibar in Jule's room stocked potato chips and four different chocolate bars. The bathtub had bubble jets. There was an endless supply of fat towels and liquid gardenia soap. In the lobby, an elderly gentleman played Gershwin on a grand piano at four each afternoon. You could get hot clay skin treatments, if you didn't mind strangers touching you. Jule's skin smelled like chlorine all day.
The Playa Grande Resort in Baja had white curtains, white tile, white carpets, and explosions of lush white flowers. The staff members were nurselike in their white cotton garments. Jule had been alone at the hotel for nearly four weeks now. She was eighteen years old.
This morning, she was running in the Playa Grande gym.
She wore custom sea-green shoes with navy laces. She ran without music. She had been doing intervals for nearly an hour when a woman stepped onto the treadmill next to her.
This woman was younger than ...
Readers will fly through Lockhart’s snappy prose; though the plot structure unfolds nontraditionally, the pacing facilitates understanding and makes each revelation manageable to follow. The dialogue, as well as Jule's internal monologue, walk the very narrow line of being formulaic, and in places does cross over into the patterns that genre fiction and thrillers are known for. But because we cannot anticipate the plot as in a true piece of genre fiction, we are still left coming out on the other side feeling like we’ve read something unique that simultaneous thrills us and forces us to question some of the darker sides of human nature...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Michelle Anya Anjirbag).
American literary critic Wayne C. Booth coined the term "unreliable narrator" in 1961 in his most famous book, The Rhetoric of Fiction, and the concept was later refined by Hamilton College professor and narrative theorist Peter J. Rabinowitz: whether it is clear from the outset or revealed at the end, the unreliable narrator causes readers to question what they have read, and to reevaluate the message of the text. This may sound counterproductive, but sometimes, by not being able to fully trust in the world they become invested in, readers can explore the themes of the text more deeply – precisely because the validity of what is presented has to be questioned.
Without question, Jule – in E. Lockhart's Genuine Fraud – is ...
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