Book Review: The Lying Game - Sara Shepard

THE LYING GAME:

Published: December 7, 2010

Publisher: HarperTeen 

Format: Hardcover

Page Count: 307 pages

Source: Amazon.com

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 good night? And can she keep up the charade, even after she realizes my murderer is watching her every move?

Let the lying game begin.

In the prologue of THE LYING GAME, we follow through the eyes of a girl named Sutton Mercer. She's woken up in a bathroom and doesn't remember how she got there. She looks at herself through a mirror, but doesn't see herself. That's because she's dead. 

Flash forward to chapter one. Told still through Sutton's eyes, we follow Emma. She's a foster child whose now be accused of choking somebody to near death with the proof of a video online by the title of SuttoninAZ. The girl who was being choked to death in the video looks exactly like Emma. Emma does some research and finds out that the girl who was strangled might just be her long-lost twin sister. Emma sends her a Facebook message to Sutton explaining everything. Sutton then sends her a message back telling her to come visit her at her house. There's only one problem: Sutton didn't write that message.

When Emma arrives, everybody begins to call her Sutton -- mainly because she looks exactly like her. She can't explain that the real Sutton could have ran off. One day, on the way to school, Emma rides with Sutton's foster sister. The foster sister gives Emma a note and claims "it was on her windshield". The note says: Sutton's dead. Keep playing along or your next. Emma then tries to piece everything together and why somebody might want to kill Sutton. Then again, Sutton does pull lots of pranks on people that could easily infuriate them -- a game called The Lying Game.

First off, the book totally sucked me in. The prologue captivated me because I just wanted to figure out how she got in that bathroom! The action and the suspense kept me on the edge of my seat throughout the entire novel.

First, the characters. Emma was an awesome main character. She wasn't whiny because she didn't get the good life like Sutton did -- she was an awesome sister by trying to figure out who murdered Sutton. That's all she wanted to do. She didn't want to inhale the glamourous life and live it up instead of looking for the killer. Because if she tells or runs away, she'll be the next one dead.

There's also more characters, like: Sutton, Garrett (Sutton's boyfriend), Ethan (an outcast to Sutton's clique), The Twitter Twins, Madeline and more characters. Emma was the best of them all, hands down.

The way that Sara Shepard crafted this mysterious world with possible backstabber friends and a dead twin whose murderer is still on the loose had me holding my breath during some scenes, shouting at the characters for them to do certain things or don't do certain things, and had my eyes glued to the pages.

The novel kept me guessing and flipping through pages the entire ride. Sara Shepard never disappoints with her novels, and I can't wait to see where she takes it with the next novel in this series. 

My Rating: