Dazzled by Books

"I'm not saying this is Sawyer's fault," the prim and proper one said delicately. "But." 

Eighteen-year-old auto mechanic Sawyer Taft did not expect her estranged grandmother to show up at her apartment door and offer her a six-figure contract to participate in debutante season. And she definitely never imagined she would accept. But when she realizes that immersing herself in her grandmother's "society" might mean discovering the answer to the biggest mystery of her life-her father's identity-she signs on the dotted line and braces herself for a year of makeovers, big dresses, bigger egos, and a whole lot of bless your heart. The one thing she doesn't expect to find is friendship, but as she's drawn into a group of debutantes with scandalous, dangerous secrets of their own, Sawyer quickly discovers that her family isn't the only mainstay of high society with skeletons in their closet. There are people in her grandmother's glittering world who are not what they appear, and no one wants Sawyer poking her nose into the past. As she navigates the twisted relationships between her new friends and their powerful parents, Sawyer's search for the truth about her own origins is just the beginning. 

Set in the world of debutante balls, grand estates and rolling green hills, Little White Lies combines a charming setting, a classic fish-out-of-water story, and the sort of layered mystery only author Jennifer Lynn Barnes can pull off.

Review:

Little White Lies by Jennifer Lynn Barnes was such a fun read. I am so excited to dive into another series by Barnes. I really enjoy the mysteries that Barnes writes. We follow Sawyer as she has been dragged into a family she didn’t know existed and is thrown into the debutante world. Sawyer’s grandmother (someone Sawyer didn’t even know existed) comes to fetch her one day to join the debutantes and in exchange for Sawyer’s corporation her grandmother will pay her.

All Sawyer wants to do is go off to a good college, so she agrees. Once Sawyer is in this world of makeup, dresses, parties, and mean girls, she finds clues about her real father’s identity and now she is on the hunt to discover who he is. Sawyer also finds friendship on this journey and a lot of very dangerous and scandalous situations. The high society men and women have a lot of secrets to hide and Sawyer is going to uncover them.

I really liked Sawyer. She is spunky and sarcastic, so definitely my kind of girl. I really loved how she inserted herself into this world that her grandmother dragged her too. I really liked how Sawyer was determined to be herself. There is a lot of growing in this book. Sawyer really discovers a lot about herself to the fact that I think she ends up surprising herself in a lot of ways. Character growth is one of the biggest things I look for in a novel. I want fantastic characters that learn from their mistakes and grow into better characters. Barnes really nailed it.

It was very interesting to get to know the different families in this book and how they were all connected at some point in the history of these people. I feel like everyone was involved in each family’s life at some point which really made the mystery of Sawyer’s dad a fun one to discover. The drama. These families have so much drama. I felt like that created a story all on its own. Reading this book was almost like watching a soap opera.

The plot was really captivating. I think there were elements of surprise along with plenty of fun. Just when you thought you knew the answer you were given to information that proved you were wrong. I found this quite interesting. Barnes was great at creating the perfect moments to reveal the clues.

I can’t wait until book two. I am so excited to dive into the lives of these characters more. I am sure there will be plenty of scandals along the way.

About the Author:

Jennifer Lynn Barnes (who mostly goes by Jen) was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has been, in turn, a competitive cheerleader, a volleyball player, a dancer, a debutante, a primate cognition researcher, a teen model, a comic book geek, and a lemur aficionado. She's been writing for as long as she can remember, finished her first full book (which she now refers to as a "practice book" and which none of you will ever see) when she was still in high school, and then wrote Golden the summer after her freshman year in college, when she was nineteen.

Jen graduated high school in 2002, and from Yale University with a degree in cognitive science (the study of the brain and thought) in May of 2006. She'll be spending the 2006-2007 school year abroad, doing autism research at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.