Hello hello and welcome or welcome back to my little bookish corner of the internet. Today I’m sharing with you my review of Little White Lies, first book in the Debutantes series by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. I jumped into this one while waiting for the sequel to The Inheritance Games.
Synopsis
“I’m not saying this is Sawyer’s fault,” the prim and proper one said delicately. “But.”
Eighteen-year-old auto mechanic Sawyer Taft did not expect her estranged grandmother to show up at her apartment door and offer her a six-figure contract to participate in debutante season. And she definitely never imagined she would accept. But when she realizes that immersing herself in her grandmother’s “society” might mean discovering the answer to the biggest mystery of her life-her father’s identity-she signs on the dotted line and braces herself for a year of makeovers, big dresses, bigger egos, and a whole lot of bless your heart.
The one thing she doesn’t expect to find is friendship, but as she’s drawn into a group of debutantes with scandalous, dangerous secrets of their own, Sawyer quickly discovers that her family isn’t the only mainstay of high society with skeletons in their closet. There are people in her grandmother’s glittering world who are not what they appear, and no one wants Sawyer poking her nose into the past. As she navigates the twisted relationships between her new friends and their powerful parents, Sawyer’s search for the truth about her own origins is just the beginning.
Review
Little White Lies is told from two time points, one at the debutante ball, and the other nine months earlier, slowly counting down towards it, in a similar way to All Your Twisted Secrets, and this works beautifully to give us little snippets of information to collect, adding together to make the whole picture.
As predicted, Barnes produces a web of lies and intrugue to get stuck into. It’s easy to lose yourself in the mixture, and to watch through Sawyer’s eyes as she tries to figure things out with no prior warning of the world she has arrived into. All the while, she’s secretly hunting out who her father is, based on a single photo and four crossed out photos.
The mystery at hand slowly reveals itself to be a much bigger than Sawyer previously thought, and certainly a completely different one to the one we think we’re originally faced with when the book starts. It’s so well done, gradually building up to a totally brilliant story that left me highly anticipating the second book in the series.
I read this as an audiobook, and I also really need to credit the narrator for bringing to live the whole “Southern Belle” asthetic to live through the words. It really gave the story another layer to appreicate.
Thanks for stopping by today. This YA mystery was so much fun, I’ll be back with the review of the sequel soon I’m sure!
And On She Reads 