The Lies We Tell
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
All Anna Xu wants to do as she starts freshman year at the local prestigious Brookings University is keep up her stellar academic performance, break out of her shell, be more social ... and investigate the unsolved on-campus murder of her former babysitter six years ago.
And if that wasn't difficult enough, it seems that Chris Lu, whose family are the Xu's business rivals, is attending Brookings too. There's no way they can be friends. Until a vandal attacks the Lu's bakery and Anna puts the perpetrator's call sign together with a clue from her investigation into the cold-case murder.
When a very specific threat is made to Anna, she is forced to team up with Chris to undertake a dangerous search into the hate crimes happening around campus. Can they root out the current threat or will the town's ugly history take them down?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Midwestern teenagers and academic rivals join forces to solve a cold case while navigating the aftermath of a hate crime in this intense thriller by Zhao (How We Fall Apart). After returning to Michigan from a summer with extended family in Beijing, Anna Xu starts her freshman year at Brookings University. Best known as the elite alma mater of many of Anna's affluent white neighbors, it's also where her former babysitter, East-Asian-cued Melissa Hong, was murdered in a seven-year-old cold case that Anna, hoping for closure, resolves to covertly investigate. As she balances college life with her inquiry, she reconnects with childhood rival Chris Lu, whose family soon opens Sunny's, a bakery in direct competition with the Xus' own struggling business, Sweetea. But when Sunny's is vandalized with a racial slur, and signed with a tag that is related to Melissa's murder, Anna and Chris begin a dangerous search to resolve the dual investigations. Unease permeates the narrative, and the mysteries tap into the feel of contemporary social consciousness. Zhao thrills and perturbs with a fast-moving plot that examines themes of racism, fetishization of Asian women, and white privilege. Ages 14–up.
