Review: Where the Truth Lies by Jessica Warman

Title: Where the Truth Lies

Author: Jes­sica Warman

Pub­lisher: Walker Books for Young Read­ers (Bloomsbury)

Date (to be) Pub­lished: Sep­tem­ber 2010

Syn­op­sis: (from Pub­lisher)

On the sur­face, Emily Meck­ler leads the per­fect life. She has three best friends, two lov­ing par­ents, and the ideal setup at the Con­necti­cut prep school where her father is the head­mas­ter. But Emily also suf­fers from dev­as­tat­ing night­mares about fire and water, and nobody knows why. Then the enig­matic Del Sugar enters her life, and Emily is imme­di­ately swept away—but her pas­sion­ate rela­tion­ship with Del is just the first of many things that aren’t quite what they seem in Emily’s life. As the lies she’s been told start to unravel, Emily must set out to dis­cover the truth regard­ing her night­mare; on a jour­ney that will lead her to ques­tion every­thing she thought she knew about love, fam­ily, and her own idyl­lic past.

Why Did It Come From?

Book Expo America

Why Did I Choose It?

One that sounded good and a quick read.

My Review:

I fully expected this to be a typ­i­cal teen romance with a lit­tle bit of fam­ily drama thrown in.  I was pleas­antly sur­prised to find that this wasn’t entirely pre­dictable and while there were some parts where I thought Emily wasn’t exactly doing the smart thing, in the end, I feel she made some good choice given her circumstances.

The story slowly reveals more and more about Emily’s per­ceived idyl­lic life as the daugh­ter of a prep school head­mas­ter.  She’s grown up on the cam­pus and now lives in the dorms with her friends, some who remain her friend and some who drift apart and are replaced by another.  It reveals a lot about how some­one who almost always fol­lows the rules can fall for the “bad boy” and have her world turned upside down.  Sur­pris­ingly, the most shock­ing lies she uncov­ers have only a lit­tle to do with bad boy Del Sugar.  Although he is a clas­sic bad boy, he isn’t the main focus of the story and yet he plays a key role in how Emily’s sit­u­a­tion devel­ops and unfolds.

A good com­ing of age story, and a worth­while quick read if you want an intrigu­ing story with­out all the non­sense that you usu­ally find in young adult novels.