Review: Lies My Girlfriend Told Me by Julie Anne Peters

When Alix's charismatic girlfriend, Swanee, dies from sudden cardiac arrest, Alix is overcome with despair. As she searches Swanee's room for mementos of their relationship, she finds Swanee's cell phone, pinging with dozens of texts sent from a mysterious contact, L.T. The most recent text reads: "Please tell me what I did. Please, Swan. Te amo. I love you."

Shocked and betrayed, Alix learns that Swanee has been leading a double life--secretly dating a girl named Liana the entire time she's been with Alix. Alix texts Liana from Swanee's phone, pretending to be Swanee in order to gather information before finally meeting face-to-face to break the news.

Brought together by Swanee's lies, Alix and Liana become closer than they'd thought possible. But Alix is still hiding the truth from Liana. Alix knows what it feels like to be lied to--but will coming clean to Liana mean losing her, too?

My Review:

This book has a unique story that leads to a very unique romance.  This was a great LGBTQIA book, and I really loved it, and found the story and the characters to all be very engaging. 

The romance in this book is one that I ship so much because the two characters are absolutely adorable together.  This romance is between Alix and Liana, who meet after Swanee dies and find out they were both dating Swanee.  So at first, they don't like each other too much, but it wasn't their faults that Swanee was cheating, and they that they are really mad at her and not at each other.  And Liana is so sweet to Alix at just the right moments, and it was all so cute how it played out.  I rooted for them to be together so much, and I hoped that Liana wouldn't be mad when she would someday probably find out the secret that Alix was keeping from her. 

I really loved the fact that Alix had a baby brother, and how she navigated that.  She was not very good with him at first, and it was cute seeing her trying to figure out how to take care of him, since she thought that he hated her because of an incident involving him choking.  Also, I loved how good Liana was with him, and how that helped her and Alix come together.

I was not a fan of Swanee because of all the lies that she told.  At the beginning of this book, she died, so we didn't get to read much that actually had her in it, but it was clear that she had built an entire life of lies from what Liana and Alix learned.  I didn't like how she hurt both of them since I really liked both of those characters.

If you like YA contemporary, read this book.

Katie