review: Beautiful Lies by Jessica Warman

Beautiful Lies by Jessica Warman

August 7, 2012

Walker Children's 

Young Adult | Thriller

Standalone

Pages: 422

Source/Format: Netgalley/egalley

Rating: ★★★★★

Rachel and Alice are an extremely rare kind of identical twins-so identical that even their aunt and uncle, whom they've lived with since their parents passed away, can't tell them apart. But the sisters are connected in a way that goes well beyond their surfaces: when one experiences pain, the other exhibits the exact same signs of distress. So when one twin mysteriously disappears, the other immediately knows something is wrong-especially when she starts experiencing serious physical traumas, despite the fact that nobody has touched her. As the search commences to find her sister, the twin left behind must rely on their intense bond to uncover the truth. But is there anyone around her she can trust, when everyone could be a suspect? And ultimately, can she even trust herself? Master storyteller Jessica Warman will keep readers guessing when everything they see-and everything they are told-suddenly becomes unreliable in this page-turning literary thriller.

REVIEW:

I love a good mindfuck. A book is amazing if it makes me view the world a little differently, and Beautiful Lies by Jessica Warman does just that—all while twisting my brain and shaking my world like a snow globe. And at the end, my mind was reeling and I was trying to process what happened.

Guys, Leah Clifford shook my world by saying once (in a live show): what if you imagined everything? What if you imagined your boy/girlfriend, your friends, your entire fucking life? And after she said that, I thought: HOOO SHIT, what did I imagine? DID I imagine anything and didn’t realize it? 

In Beautiful Lies, a character imagines something. And it scared the shit out of me. Beautiful Lies is such a dangerous little book. I don’t know what really went down with it because of that ending (oh, but I love it) and all that DID go down. All I want to ask is… did she make it all up? WHAT REALLY HAPPENED? And it’s such a beautiful little lie.

I don’t want to say too much about Beautiful Lies because I want you all to experience how I did: unspoiled and going in dark. I had NO IDEA what this one was about. Basically I saw Jessica Warman had a new book coming out and I requested it from Bloomsbury. Then I read it. I hadn’t read reviews or even the summary. All I really knew were there were twins. Yeah. But sometimes, that’s the best way to experience a book, you know? Going in without knowing anything. 

But let me tell you that I almost set this book down. I started reading it, expecting it to be something like Between, but once I started reading it, like actually sitting down to read it more than teasing myself by reading a few pages, I realized that of COURSE it’s different than Between—as it should be. Silly me. Once I got over that, I became more invested in the story and I couldn’t not read it. I read half of it in one night.

Oh, and speaking of nights—this is the perfect book to read at night. I love reading horror at night because it makes it seem that much scarier, you know? You’re safe in the sunlight reading it, but if you’re brave, you’ll read it at 2 AM in the country (which, I do live in the country, and yes, I was up at 2 AM reading Beautiful Lies.) Perfect. Give me a cup of hot cocoa with marshmallows on top and I’ll be happy, if not a tiny bit scared.

Alice and Rachel, the twins, have such distinct personalities. I loved it—that they were so alike on the outside, but so different on the inside. Alice is wild, while Rachel is timid. Just like Between, Beautiful Lies has an amazing cast of characters that leap from the pages. And everything is just so real, so when you learn that a few things are fabricated—are made up by a character’s imagination—that it shakes you to your core. It’s damn scary to read that this character is losing her mind and you don’t know what is real or not real. 

As for the plot—who kidnapped the twin—I totally guessed who it was. The clues are all nice and lined up, or maybe I just read too many murder stories. But you start to guess yourself, am I wrong?, as Rachel dives into finding out who kidnapped Alice. And then the heart racing ending happens and the world shatters. It’s just… Beautiful Lies is an amazing, amazing book and you should definitely read it. I’d be really disappointed if you didn’t.

If you love a book that messes with your mind and dives into mental issues and kidnapping, Beautiful Lies is for you. With Beautiful Lies, Jessica Warman has made a fan for life. 

I can feel the individual hairs on his arms brushing against my face. I want to lean into him and squeeze my eyes shut more tightly, to fall asleep and wake up in a new day where none of this is happening. I want to believe him that everything will be okay. But I can't; I don't. Instead, I start to cry.

 - p. 96, egalley