Genuine Fraud: from the bestselling author of Tiktok sensation We Were Liars

“She became the kind of woman it would be a great mistake to underestimate.” I LOVED E. Lockart’s We Were Liars. It’s been FIVE YEARS since I read the book and I AM STILL SHOCKED about the ending because it was twenty different kinds of insane and I LOVED IT. Which is why I was SO excited to see Genuine Fraud sitting in some surprise bookmail from Bloomsbury India – it sounded (from all the raving reviews I’d read) that this was another masterpiece and I dove in as soon as I could. Let’s break it down: WRITING: E. Lockhart’s writing has only IMPROVED since when she wrote We Were Liars with every word and chapter dripping in suspense. The short, disjointed sentences give you a little information and make twenty other questions pop up in your head, which is exactly the intended effect. E. Lockhart and Genuine Fraud really manage to pull you in and leave you SO DESPERATE for answers that your only solution is to binge the whole thing. (P.S: I took all of a DAY to read this book.) IDEA AND STRUCTURE: Genuine Fraud IS TOLD IN REVERSE. It was a disorienting experience that somehow managed to work PERFECTLY for this book, keeping the mystery alive and keeping the reader guessing. It pieced things together in REVERSE, talking about a murder (or two) and a social chameleon. I loved seeing the unravelling of Jule and Imogen and the STRUCTURE WAS THE HIGHLIGHT OF THIS BOOK. PLOT: I loved the plot of this book. I probably wouldn’t have loved it as much if it wasn’t structured the way it was, but everything managed to work in the most unconventional way possible. I loved trying to understand Jule and predicting her next move (and failing.) I did spend most of this book ANTICIPATING a jaw dropping end like We Were Liars had, because this is one of the books that NEEDS one of those endings. And yet, the unfinished, vague and NORMAL note on which this book ended was the ONE thing I didn’t like about it all. I guess I WAS hoping for a deeper motivation / reason for everything happening but after over 250 pages of sitting at the edge of my seat, unsure of what came next (or before, depending on how you look at it) the actual ending was SUCH A LET DOWN. CHARACTERS: The more I found out about the characters, as I went back in time with E. Lockhart piecing this book together in reverse, I STILL feel like I don’t know either of the two main characters. I didn’t fall in love with either of them, but I do like them. I admire them, but I don’t know them. Thinking about Jule, Imogen (or even Forrest, Brooke and Patti) leave me very confused. CONCLUSION: This book is definitely one of the better mysteries I’ve read in a while and you should DEFINITELY pick it up. Genuine Fraud is about an heiress and a social chameleon told in REVERSE and there is murder and romance and WHAT MORE ARE YOU LOOKING FOR, REALLY? I only wished the ending was done better. 4 stars.

I liked how the author told the story backwards, it gives a sense of suspense, it is a page turner novel, you want to know Jule origin (the true one, not the fictional hero origin she invented), why she do the things she done. In the end, she get out unscathed and this detail is infuriating at least to me, i hope there will be a sequel.

This is a very hard book to review because to do so in my normal manner would give away major plot points and nobody wants that. I think it says it all when I will admit to not just reading this book but devouring it in one sitting - it even made it on a bathroom break where I risked limb, if not life, in reading goig upstairs and down. Told from the perspective of Jule West Williams it is a curious hybrid of first person narrative and third person perspective and is engagingly written. It is the tale of how she came to be how she is and how she has decided on who she is. Ms Lockhart weaves an exceptionally good tale and one that means you really do have to turn the next page. There is so much I want to say about the various characters in this book Jule, Imogen and the minor players of Dominico, Brooke, Paolo and Forrest but I simply can't. For a slim volume it packs a lot of punch and I am thankful that it was not diluted by the author being pushed to increase the word count at the expense of the tale. From the sample pages this is not the book I was anticipating reading. It is so much more and took a twist right from the second chapter that I genuinely did not expect. Marketed as a YA novel it definitely doesn't read that way and is written in a way that is accessible to people like myself that haven't been eligible for the YA tag for 30 some years. I did receive this book as a freebie but that has not coloured my judgement in this, admittedly glowing and marginally sycophantic review. This is taut storytelling at its best and has been crafted not thrown together to meet a deadline. I RECEIVED A FREE COPY OF THIS BOOK FROM READERS FIRST IN EXCHANGE FOR AN HONEST REVIEW.