Only the Pretty Lies, Rebekah Crane

“Lines are easy to follow. They’re comforting. It’s why most people stay where they are.”

I had this in my watchlist forever because I love Rebekah Crane, so I was thrilled that it was an Amazon First book so I could get it a month early. Amoris isn’t a bad person, she’s a product of generations of people ignoring (or contributing to) systemic racism. This is one of those books that I regret reading other reviews before I read my own. Especially reviews written by adults who have forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager.

If there was anything I wished more of with this, the characters could have been more fleshed out. Especially Jamison and Sam. Amoris is painfully blind to bigotry and racism, and she does a lot of things to make herself look better, not because it’s the right thing to do. She doesn’t experience a lot of growth until late in the game. I think this is a good story, and with some fleshing out of characters, it could be even better.

Read this review on Amazon and Goodreads.

Only the Pretty Lies is available for preorder on Amazon for $4.99, it releases May 1st.

About the Book:
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.