I had such high hopes for this long anticipated novel after reading We Were Liers a couple of years ago. I adored that book and hearing E Lockhart talk at YALC made me more excited for the release of Genuine Fraud.
Title: Genuine Fraud
Author: E Lockhart
Genre: Contemporary, Mystery, Suspense
Publication Date: 5th September 2017
Publisher: Hot Key Books
Pages: 272
Summary: Imogen is a runaway heiress, an orphan, a cook, and a cheat.
Jule is a fighter, a social chameleon, and an athlete.
An intense friendship. A disappearance. A murder, or maybe two.
A bad romance, or maybe three.
Blunt objects, disguises, blood, and chocolate. The American dream, superheroes, spies, and villains.
A girl who refuses to give people what they want from her.
A girl who refuses to be the person she once was.
The writing itself ends up being quite confusing from the format of the book. Effectively you are reading the novel end to start, not start to end, which is all well and good until you have the issues of sub-chapters within the chapters that follow a forward time-line. It can leave you thinking ‘wait, has this already happened?’ I think it was a very brave move and clearly shows clever writing, however could have been pulled off a little better. Where as the writing was clever, i found it to be very descriptive, something that a lot of people are put off by. I like descriptive writing but sadly found Genuine Fraud a little difficult to digest at times. Having such detailed descriptions of every character when there are many to be introduced didn’t work at all.
Also the story-line ended up being a little confusing for me. I don’t know if this is dyslexia based with the complicated format, but i found it hard to follow and a lot of the characters were introduced with little warning, leaving them difficult to place. I’m still not completely sure i know what happened in this whole book.
Speaking of the characters, i found connecting with Jule, our protagonist, a little difficult. This was a little bit of a shock after i connected so well with the characters in We Were Liers. I found them all to be quite surface level with not much about them.
I don’t have an awful lot to say about this story, the writing was okay, the story-line kept me interested but i felt it wasn’t wrapped up very well. Not E Lockhart’s best work i imagine. I want to try out some of her older novels to see how they compare and if i actually enjoy her writing or enjoy the one book that got super famous.
The Little Contemporary Corner 