Hide and Seek (Lying Game, #4)

by Sara Shepard

[clementine]

Hmm. Rating Sara Shepard's books is always surprisingly difficult. On one level, they're not good books. They're terrible, really, and their ratings on Goodreads always surprise me, because REALLY? No. These books don't really deserve anything higher than two stars. But at the same time, I don't hate them the same way I hate other books I might rate one or two stars. I hated In the Skin of a Lion (and here I must apologize to my grade 12 English teacher, because I read it for his class, and it's his favourite book).

I liked The Lying Game series better than Pretty Little Liars at first; the first Lying Game book came out right about the time when PLL started getting so ridiculously convoluted that even I, lover of guilty pleasures and avid consumer of trashy media, couldn't handle it. The Lying Game was based on an equally ridiculous premise, but it wasn't as completely unbelievable and bogged down with bullshit as PLL.

But now... meh. The series is incredibly formulaic, and not much in the way of plot advancement really happens. Every book, Sutton and Emma suspect someone new of Sutton's murder; Sutton realizes, through a convenient but limited flashback to the night she died, that they were wrong; Emma miraculously finds out the same information sometime later. Along the way, Emma bonds with Sutton's friends and enemies, and some sort of family drama is revealed. The show is so much better, and that's because it's drastically different.

This was a good book in terms of the amount of brain power it took for me to get through it. I guess it came at the right time, since I'm so bogged down with readings for school, and this required absolutely no thinking at all. Which, really, is not a GOOD thing, but a thing that was good at the time.

So, overall, one of the worst books in a bad series. Awesome.