Book 5 of my 2023 Reading Challenge
read from 1/9 - 1/13
Only the Pretty Lies
by Rebekah Crane
Summary (via Goodreads)
Convention doesn’t carry much weight in Alder Creek. It doesn’t in Amoris Westmore’s family either. Daughter of a massage therapist and a pothead artist, inheritor of her grandmother’s vinyl collection, and blissfully entering her senior year in high school, Amoris never wants to leave her progressive hometown. Why should she?
Everything changes when Jamison Rush moves in next door. Jamison was Amoris’s first crush, and their last goodbye still stings. But Jamison stirs more than bittersweet memories. One of the few Black students in Alder Creek, Jamison sees Amoris’s idyllic town through different eyes. He encourages Amoris to look a little closer, too. When Jamison discovers a racist mural at Alder Creek High, Amoris’s worldview is turned upside down.
Now Amoris must decide where she stands and whom she stands by, threatening her love for the boy who stole her heart years ago. Maybe Alder Creek isn’t the town Amoris thinks it is. She’s certainly no longer the girl she used to be.
Everything changes when Jamison Rush moves in next door. Jamison was Amoris’s first crush, and their last goodbye still stings. But Jamison stirs more than bittersweet memories. One of the few Black students in Alder Creek, Jamison sees Amoris’s idyllic town through different eyes. He encourages Amoris to look a little closer, too. When Jamison discovers a racist mural at Alder Creek High, Amoris’s worldview is turned upside down.
Now Amoris must decide where she stands and whom she stands by, threatening her love for the boy who stole her heart years ago. Maybe Alder Creek isn’t the town Amoris thinks it is. She’s certainly no longer the girl she used to be.
My Opinion
2 stars
This was not the book for me. It would've been a fairly standard teen coming-of-age story but there were also heavy topics, especially concerning race, shoehorned in. It reminded me of a "very special episode" of a Disney show or family sitcom. It veered so drastically from one extreme to the other and there wasn't a lot of explaining or investment in how it all happened or reflection on the really big changes that occurred.
One thing I did really like was Amoris's description of herself as a "cover song" when she realized she's been living everyone else's traditions and not discovering who she actually is.
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