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One of Us Is Lying by Karen M. McManus
3.0

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One of Us is Lying cannot be compared to The Breakfast Club which is what a lot of other readers are saying. This book is about a group of five kids that get after school detention. At the beginning of the book, they all take turns labeling each other as high school stereotypes. This is where the similarities end. One of the students in the room, Simon, ends up dying. He has a severe peanut allergy and he dies in detention. The police name the four students in the classroom as the top suspects.

One of my favorite aspects of this book is the formatting. It's split between four different perspectives (those of the suspect students) and each section is dated and timestamped. This formatting works well with the plot because you, as the reader, get see the situation from all sides. You get to try to figure which one of them killed Simon. You'll fall in love with the characters and wish all of them innocent.

This is where the heartache comes. The last hundred pages or so will rip your heart out. I threw the library's copy of this book across the room at one point. At the end of Chapter 24, if you must know. From there, I couldn't put the book down. I'm not going to lie, the beginning of the book was kind of slow and tedious, but those last 100 pages... they flew by.

Is this a Halloween read? No. It's not scary or suspenseful. Don't read it in October if you have other spooky reads you could devour. However, add this to To-Be-Read (TBR) shelf for sure. There's a sequel, One of Us is Next, but I'm not sure where it'll go. I thought this was an amazing stand-alone and I'm a little nervous about the sequel. We'll see.

I rated this a four star because the beginning was slow and choppy, but I guess it needed to be. The plot was amazingly executed. The characterization was good, not the best, but I fell in love with many of the characters. It's worth mentioning that the characters had their own personalities and it was easy to tell whose point of view you were in, even without looking at the heading. The settings were well developed, a little cliched, but well developed. Overall, it was a good read!

I recommend this book to anyone who likes a good mystery because you could totally solve this on your own. It has a cute romance in it, good character arcs for those readers who like to see drastic character changes, and it's an easy read.