The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett

by Chelsea Sedoti

[readingwithwrin]

"There's no such thing as a normal highschool experience, Thorny. You assume everyone else is happy all he time and living an ideal life. You don't get that other people are pretending too."

MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS



Hawthorn is not a very likable character in my opinion. While yes she is very observant and admits that she wants to fit in like everyone else. She also does nothing to make herself more likable in almost any situation. Not only is she extremely self centered not just teenager self centered either, but truly so self centered that even her best friend gets tried of it after awhile.

I hoped to see things start to change once Lizzie Lovett went missing and Hawthorn started to become obsessed with the case. But instead Hawthorn ends up going down a dangerous path in my opinion. Not only does she start coming up with crazy theories about Lizzie, and how if she was able to find her that then Lizzie would help her fit in and be liked by people. So in order to do this Hawthorn decides to get close to those who knew Lizzie as how she was now, after high school.

"Lizzie could teach me how to ignore all the people who thought I was broken and strange. She'd teach me how to fit in, how to be likable. How to be like her."

Which leads her to Lizzie's boyfriend who I didn't like at all. Not because I thought he did anything to Lizzie, but because after awhile I could see most likely how things were going to end with him and Hawthorn and I didn't want her to do that. I wanted her to stop obsessing over Lizzie so much and hoping that Lizzie's boyfriend would care for her as much as she was starting to about him.

Now that I've talked about most of the things I didn't like lets get to the few I did. I liked how for once we had a real brother sister dynamic and mostly 'normal' family dynamic as well. Hawthorn didn't blame everything on her parents, and instead knew that they did what they were doing because they cared about her and just wanted the best for her. Plus the brother did truly care about what was happening to her, even if he didn't exactly understand her.
The add in of my hippies was also really enjoyable and was part of the reason I kept reading. They weren't a huge part of the story, but they were interesting and helped Hawthorn occasionally.

Overall this book fell kind of flat for me, but I know others will love it.

"Don't talk then. Paint. Dance. Write. Just don't hold your feelings inside. The longer we let pain hide in our hearts, the more it turns to poison."