One of Us is Lying is loosely based on The Breakfast Club, but with a more sinister edge. There’s the geek, the jock, the criminal, the prom queen and the outsider. Five enter detention but only four leave alive. I read this during readathon and it kept me turning the pages, eager to know who did it. I am not super familiar with the film it’s based on.

Simon is the creator of a gossip app that reports on the secrets of Bayview High. There are few people who don’t have a reason to kill him, but what are his fellow detentionees hiding? They might all start out as stereotypes but of course, people are so often different from how they present themselves to the world.

Cooper is the jock and his secret is nothing to be ashamed of, it’s society that is the problem, especially the attitudes in the sporting community. I think for him, although he lost the choice of telling friends and family, it wasn’t altogether a bad thing.

That’s the kind of person you can get away with killing: someone everybody else wants dead.

Addy is the prom queen character and seems a bit air-headed at the start but you soon learn her relationship with her boyfriend is controlling. She has relied on him too much and she must earn not to be co-dependent. What she did wasn’t right, but maybe it was good for her.

I liked Nate who is the least advantaged of the bunch. He lives with his alcoholic father and makes ends meet by dealing drugs. He is not a bad person but driven by shitty circumstances. He’s on probation when the death happens and obviously, everyone thinks he is the prime suspect.

Bronwyn’s a straight A student with aspirations of Yale. Her secret will put that at risk. She felt like the main character in this, but maybe the hardest to feel sympathy for. I don’t think what she did was dealt with properly either. The media are overly intrusive in all cases though, it’s a real problem that people are tried through the media before things even get to court.

I guess we’re almost friends now, or as friendly as you can get when you’re not one hundred percent sure the other person isn’t framing you for murder.

Each character has chapters in first person narrative but the voices aren’t that distinct so I did rely on the headings to tell me who was talking at times. These four teenagers who didn’t have reasons to mix normally, start to forge friendships, despite lingering suspicion. By the conclusion, it’s a sad reminder of the brutal social environment that high school can be. It’s so hard to come out of it unscathed.

Read Hanna’s review @ Booking in Heels.

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Book Source: Purchased