Summer Reading Challenge 2018: Tell Me Lies by Carola Lovering (Chrissy’s review)

 

Tell Me Lies
written by Carola Lovering
published by Atria Books, 2018

find it here: (affiliate links) Barnes & Noble, Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, Target, Walmart, Book Depository, Goodreads

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book as part of the Summer Reading Challenge promotional event hosted by BookSparks.

Did I enjoy this book? It was okay, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I had hoped.

Tell Me Lies was told from Lucy’s perspective and Stephen’s. I enjoyed the dual POVs. I also liked that we were with Lucy and Stephen from before they met to the present day. Their relationship wasn’t a healthy one by a long shot, though.

I think a lot of people will relate to Lucy and her one that got away. Stephen was that guy who grabbed Lucy’s attention and wouldn’t let go. He made her feel beautiful, worthy, sexy. He was the guy she thought would be The One. And he was the guy that she missed some amazing opportunities for. Lucy is a smart young woman, and it saddened me to see her go down the road she went down just because of some guy. I also think a lot of people will dislike Lucy because she didn’t let go of Stephen in the beginning, that she let him control so much of her life. Stephen was an annoying jerk. He was arrogant and didn’t deserve any girl he was with. I would be surprised if anyone actually liked Stephen as a character. I did feel for him and the stress of law school, but that was about it. And even that stress didn’t justify the way he acted and treated his girl.

From the praise on the back cover, I was expecting something more exciting and page-turning and thrilling, but I thought it was lacking in the exciting and thrilling department. Although, I didn’t really care all that much about these characters and their story, Tell Me Lies did keep me turning pages. I wanted to finish the book. So, there was something to this story that made me keep going.

 

Would I recommend it? If asked about it, I wouldn’t tell you to skip it.

About the book – from Goodreads: A thrilling, sexy coming-of-age story exploring toxic love, ruthless ambition, and shocking betrayal, Tell Me Lies is about that one person who still haunts you—the other one. The wrong one. The one you couldn’t let go of. The one you’ll never forget.

Lucy Albright is far from her Long Island upbringing when she arrives on the campus of her small California college, and happy to be hundreds of miles from her mother, whom she’s never forgiven for an act of betrayal in her early teen years. Quickly grasping at her fresh start, Lucy embraces college life and all it has to offer—new friends, wild parties, stimulating classes. And then she meets Stephen DeMarco. Charming. Attractive. Complicated. Devastating.

Confident and cocksure, Stephen sees something in Lucy that no one else has, and she’s quickly seduced by this vision of herself, and the sense of possibility that his attention brings her. Meanwhile, Stephen is determined to forget an incident buried in his past that, if exposed, could ruin him, and his single-minded drive for success extends to winning, and keeping, Lucy’s heart.

Alternating between Lucy’s and Stephen’s voices, Tell Me Lies follows their connection through college and post-college life in New York City. Deep down, Lucy knows she has to acknowledge the truth about Stephen. But before she can free herself from this addicting entanglement, she must confront and heal her relationship with her mother—or risk losing herself in a delusion about what it truly means to love.

With the psychological insight and biting wit of Luckiest Girl Alive, and the yearning ambitions and desires of Sweetbitter, this keenly intelligent and staggeringly resonant novel chronicles the exhilaration and dilemmas of young adulthood, and the difficulty of letting go, even when you know you should.

 

 

* This post contains affiliate links.

** This post first appeared on Every Free Chance Books (everyfreechance.com) on July 17, 2018.