Beautiful Liar
Tara Bond
Nina has been supporting her family for forever. After her mother finally checks into rehab, Nina needs a well paying job to get her life to continue. A pricy club fulfills that need, but she’s likely to run into a few bad-boy heartthrobs that could cause her life to go offtrack.
This is another drunk mother scenario. This time though, it’s a very expensive rehab that is going to be saving the mother. I keep searching through my archives of reviews in the hope I can find the novel where the daughter just helps the mother on her own, but I don’t remember what it was called… I’m not at all calling Nina out to do that rather extreme method though.
Nina is a cute little character with some spunk, but with an inability to keep her own head straight. Don’t be confused here, she’s not a complete loser. Romance, my love, romance. It’ll kill all the young people if they keep going like this.
In fact, the front cover of this novel has RED lips, not pink ones as you see on the left. If you read the text, you’ll work that out as well – they should be red or maybe even black.
This is something I normally wouldn’t mention. But, since they are having sex, I wanted to know about them using protection. If you’re going to have sex with a man who has had a multitude of other drunk partners,you better use a condom or be on the pill. Nina doesn’t mention either of these things, and for a while I thought that she might end up pregnant too.
I wanted to not enjoy this novel. I couldn’t believe that yet another bad boy romance could get me in and reading. But I did finish it off. There was just no suspense as far as I was concerned, and that killed some of it for me. I’m giving it 3 stars. I’d recommend This Raging Light, for younger readers looking for an almost identical sort of storyline.
I couldn’t work out what the main part of this novel was. Finding someone? Yes, ok. Saving a magazine? Yes, ok. Exposing some sort of crime? Yes, ok. Character development? Nope. Boring stuff about jobs that I didn’t care about? Oh, yes. None of the action happened in the first half. I wanted to love it, I really did.
This book was such a disappointment. All the exciting things promised in the blurb turned out to be completely predictable. The grand secret? Meh. I wasn’t that convinced that her dad had done anything wrong. It’s hard to cope with children, of any kind!
I’m not sure what I was expecting from this novel. I wanted something fantasy because I was sick of teenage drama. No fear here – a scrap of ‘isn’t she pretty’, but otherwise fantasy running wild. Very satisfying and light to read.
Whiplash! The ending took me completely by surprise. Phew! My head may have literally flipped backwards. I couldn’t believe it. I just had to keep reading, but in fact, it was in a course of a couple of pages that the whole thing ended up on its head.
Em had to kill to get her new position in the court. I wonder whether some people are looking down on her as having ‘cheated’, and in fact, some of the dialogue is about revenge and trying to hold down sensible ideas after killing people. It’s something I’ve been contemplating lately, with all the fiction I have been reading. It does sound like sometimes the easiest solution is to kill the figurehead!
This should have been called The Slow News Sisters instead of Keep Me Posted. What’s wrong with using a catchy term, even if it is later used in the novel? Not to mention it would have been a heads up for the progress being glacial.
What I loved was that the blending of fact and fiction made me feel at home in the novel. I didn’t object that I never really understood everything behind Lord’s motives. I didn’t mind that there was no happy ending.
When will I get tired of extreme-situation teenage novels? Maybe some time soon. I’m feeling an end of my sympathy for idiots that let love get in the way of all things! But real life problems? Yes, I’ll take those. This novel isn’t too far off course for things that could happen. Who knows how many people are having this problem, and it’s just not picked up?
You’d think that since I was up until 1am finishing this book (and doing some other writing) than means I enjoyed it. Honestly, I’m not sure that I did. There were huge time gaps and gaps in Jinhau’s memory that made me fall out of the novel time and time again.