Thank you NetGalley and Greenleaf Book Group for the copy of A Lie For A Lie by Jane Buckingham. So much is packed into this short read you won't want to put it down. If you love a shocking reveal, this book is for you. If you love three-dimensional characters, this book is for you. If you love teenage angst, this book is for you. If you love writing that propels you through the story, this book is for you! Basically, if you love a good book, this is it. I look forward to Jane Buckingham’s next book. 5 stars.

Jane Buckingham captured my millennial heart long ago with her Modern Girl's Guide to Life collection of books. She taught me how to fold a fitted sheet! Do I do it? No, but not because she didn't teach me.

After some controversy over the past few years, I'm happy to see her again. When I saw she was releasing a new book, I had to get my hands on it even though I'm too old for YA. I wouldn't even classify this as YA, this is more for teens.

It was an interesting concept, following stories like One Of Us Is Lying and Pretty Little Liars. All of the lying liars! It also reminded me a bit of Cruel Summer, a show that was on Freeform for 2 seasons. I enjoyed that show and could totally imagine this as a season of that anthology series, had it not been tragically canceled.

If you have teens who like to read, you should definitely give them this book. As for us old people, it's not really up our alley but the writing is great and the characters have a lot of heart.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the chance to read and review!

Thank you to Greenleaf Book Group and to Jane Buckingham for the advanced copy of A Lie for a Lie!

First off, I was really impressed with how this story captured the quintessential essence of classic YA novels. I grew up devouring YA fiction. Christopher Pike, Caroline B. Cooney, Louis Duncan; these authors made up the trifecta for my literary upbringing. This book made me feel like I was reading a new work by one of my formative favorites.

From the prologue, I was captured by the foreboding sense of an unseen enemy. As the story progresses, and the characters are brought further into the light, I found myself working overtime to piece the mystery together and figure out who was behind it all. The dialogue is so tight, and the attention to detail really helps paint a full picture that the reader can explore. The setting feels alive, and I found myself staying up late just so I could see how everything would resolve.

I'm so glad that this is the start of a new series, I will most certainly be back for more! I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to relive those middle school memories of staying up late to read the next best YA title.

A Lie for a Lie by Jane Buckingham was a good YA novel. The book follows a very self-controled girl who is solely focused on getting into Harvard. Her story develops as events happening to her and also caused by her affect her goal.
This was a well written, fast moving story. I enjoyed it!

When I was reading this it definitely reminded me of One Of Us Is Lying and I loved that book. The teenage cliques and hushed secrets and gossip turning into a revenge network was very captivating and it did have me wanting to keep reading to learn Revenge's identity.

When I was in middle and high school, I had a YA novel addiction. It didn't matter how ridiculous, depressing, or concerning the subject matter was, if it was YA, it was in my hands. I snuck 13 Reasons Why out of my school library, obsessed over every Natalie D. Richards book, cried over Before I Fall, and let John Green practically raise me. I loved YA. Especially (for some unknown reason) the books that centered on high schoolers dealing in revenge. So it's only fitting that, almost a decade later, I am fulfilling my fourteen-year-old dreams and dabbling, once again, in revenge.

I'll admit, I didn't read too much of the synopsis before immediately needing my hands on this arc. I saw the cover, read "Revenge," and said "How can I get this sent to me immediately" (I bought a Kindle to read this arc, but you can forget that I said that).

In A Lie for a Lie, Milford High School becomes the setting for a series of vengeful retaliations when an anonymous Instagram account called @Revenge starts granting requests for public justice. When one retaliation by @Revenge goes wrong and seriously injures someone, one of Milford High's students, Sabrina Richards, begins an investigation into who the owner of the infamous account is. Joined by other accomplices, friends, and foes, Sabrina seeks to uncover the truth while trying to stay out of the line of the fire of the account holder.

There were many things that I liked and disliked about this book. One major problem I found with it was the blatant use of tropes throughout that dimmed the magic of the book and just had me counting in my notes how many I could spot: All Adults Are Useless and Clueless, Nobody Understands Me, Love Makes You Crazy, Everyone Wants to be Popular, HARVARD IS EVERYTHING, and Dead Parent(s). And these in and of themselves can be utilized well and push the main character to develop as they experience the world and make their own choices, but in this book, the tropes served no other purpose other than to blatantly distract the reader from who the owner of the @Revenge account was. Most of the characters are extremely flat because of this and impossible to nail down. I cannot tell you how many times I scrolled back to previous chapters, trying to psychologically profile each character to understand if and why they would make a certain decision, and how exactly it fit with their character so far (It didn't).

One thing I enjoyed about this book was that the pacing was pretty well set from the beginning, and the writing style was engaging and easy to follow. I had no problem reading hundreds of pages in one sitting, and found myself cruising through to the end because I wanted to know if my guess as to whose account it was was right (It was, sort of). And while I know I might not have identified with the YA themes and tropes as well as I would have when I was actually a teenager, I did enjoy this book (and surprisingly don't regret reading it, which I sometimes feel after reading a YA as a palette cleanser after a particularly depressing book).

Teenaged me, this one is for you. Three stars for nostalgia.

Thank you to the publisher for this e-arc.