Book Review: Genuine Fraud by E. Lockhart

Posted September 7, 2017 by shooting in Book Review / 18 Comments

Genuine Fraud by E. Lockhart

Review by Lauren

Source: copy from ALA17; all opinions are my own

Official Summary (add on Goodreads): 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.

Review: I loved E. Lockhart’s novel We Were Liars, but it’s one of those books that people seemed to either love or hate. I imagine that Genuine Fraud will have a similar reaction, though I have to admit I’m a bit more ambivalent. I liked the book but it’s not something I loved. It was a fairly quick book that kept me reading and wanting to know more. The book is actually told in reverse order, which made me think of the movie Memento. This is a style that might annoy some, but I liked it. I thought it was a clever way to revealing things little by little so readers were always kind of wondering about the main character, Jule.

Genuine Fraud: Memento Meets YA Fiction #bookreview Click To Tweet

This is a book full of complex characters. None of them are all that great of people – though some are certainly better than others. There is romance, jealously, murder, betrayal. It’s packed full of suspense and mystery. It’s not a long book by any means, so it’s easy to finish this one in a single day. Chances are you’ll want to, so you can figure out what exactly is going on sooner than later.

***

Don’t forget to enter to win $20 via Paypal – giveaway ends Saturday!

18 responses to “Book Review: Genuine Fraud by E. Lockhart

  1. This sounds like an interesting read – I don’t know I’ve ever read a book that goes backwards. I do enjoy the movie Memento though, so I might be ok with that. The characters definitely sound intriguing!

  2. We Were Liars was gorgeously written but it wasn’t memorable and it was a polariazing book for sure. I am curious about this one, but not itching to read it. I will put it in the maybe pile.

  3. I thought We Were Liars was fun, and I think I blew through it because it was fairly short and just the way it was written, it was kind of a fast read. Sounds like this one might be somewhat similar? I might give this a shot.

  4. I’ve started reading this one in fact, but not read the previous one by her. I’m curious now bc I’ve read reviews with such different reactions to it.

  5. I grabbed the ARC of this from the bookstore where I worked, but more to try to trade for something else that I would read. Haven’t read this author yet, because I heard such extremes about the other book I couldn’t make up my mind to pick it up. Great review though!

  6. I agree with you, I think this is probably one of those books that people will love or hate. I wasn’t a huge fan of We Were Liars, but I really didn’t like Genuine Fraud. Like, I didn’t *hate* it but I was kind of bored? Which is really not what I want to be when reading a mystery/thriller hahha. I am glad you liked this one more than I did thougH! Great review 😀

    Shannon @ It Starts at Midnight recently posted: Do You Post When You’d Really Rather Not?
  7. I liked this book and definitely was HOOKED on reading it because I had to know if what I thought was going on actually WAS what was going on. And it was, which I was kind of disappointed about because I wanted to be surprised. Anyway, it was a cool book and I think it was good that it was short– otherwise, I don’t think I would’ve lost interest after a while. I also didn’t like one single character in the book, so there’s that…..

    Great review!! I agree that I think this one is going to be polarizing!

Leave a Reply

(Enter your URL then click here to include a link to one of your blog posts.)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.