Synopsis:
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.
Purchase From:
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository
Review
*I received a free advanced reader’s copy of this book at BookCon. This did not influence my review of this book in anyway. This is an honest review of the novel as I saw it. This novel was released on September 5, 2017.*
The only book I’d ever read by E. Lockhart was How to Be Bad, which she cowrote with two authors. I also didn’t enjoy it. However, I’ve heard mostly good things about We Were Liars so when I had the opportunity to snag an ARC of her newest novel and get it signed, I decided to go for it. Thankfully, I ended up really enjoying Genuine Fraud.
The novel is told in the third person and follows Jule, but the chapters go backwards in time. I don’t want to spoil anything because half the fun of this novel is the mystery, so I won’t go too much into the plot. What I will say is I really enjoyed the twists in this novel and was kind of surprised by a lot of what happened. Additionally, I really liked the main character, Jule. She’s definitely an antihero who sometimes does bad things, but I still liked her anyway.
What I really loved about this story was learning more about Jule and her friendship with Imogen. Since the story works backwards, it was interesting to see how everything came to be at the beginning of the novel. Moreover, I really liked that while the novel answered most of my questions, I was still left with questions by the end of the story. Usually, I don’t like that kind of thing, but I really liked how it added to the mystery and left me still questioning what was true in Jule’s story and what was not.
Overall, I highly recommend buying this book when it’s released, because if you’re like me, you’re going to want to reread it from back to front once you’re done.
Borrow or Buy: Buy it!
Stars:
Favorite Line:
“[Jule] believed that the best way to avoid having your heart broken was to pretend you don’t have one.”
Other Reviews
Book Reviews by Ava
The Loud Library Lady
Between the Pages
Zakiya N. Jamal 
Thanks so much for linking back to me!
No problem!
^^same here thank you! You should DEFINITELY read We Were Liars (it’s one of my favorites). Ah you’re so lucky you got a copy signed by E. Lockhart?! I totally agree with you it is good to buy this book. I love the name of you’re blog, it’s pretty creative :)). Imogen is so twisted…it’s such a good mystery!
No problem! I definitely want to read We Were Liars now. And yes it was so nice to meet her in person. I have a question, what do you think the ending meant? Do you really think it was Imogen the whole time or the detective is just way off and Jule got away with it. I don’t know what to believe. 😂
Agh hmm I feel like I read it so long ago!! But I’m going to assume I thought that it was Imogen; it very possibly could’ve been that Jules got away with it because I don’t pick up on things very quickly at all…lol
Lol yeah I definitely want to read it again. I think it really was Jules but it’s crazy that the detective believed it was Imogen, which kind of made me believe it too.