Review: Pretenders by Lisi Harrison

Pretenders by Lisi Harrison




Publisher: Poppy
Series: Pretenders #1
Pages: 304 Pages (Hardcover)
Genre: Young Adult
Release Date: October 1, 2013
Summary:
Three girls, two guys, five secret journals.
The five most popular students at Noble High have secrets to hide; secrets they wrote down in their journals. Now one of their own exposes the private entries...
I am leaking these because I'm tired and I know you are too. The success bar is too high and pretending has become the only way to reach it. Instagrams are filtered, Facebook profiles are embellished, photos are shopped, reality TV is scripted, body parts get upgraded like software, and even professional athletes are cheating. The things we believe in aren't real. 
We are pretenders.

Rating: 

Review:

When I read the blurb to this, I was sure I was gonna love this.
The idea is great, seriously. Even after I read it, and only rated it 2stars... I still think the idea is great. BUT somehow it failed to impress me.

While it's on some basic level quite cleverly done, it completely failed in the execution.

I found the character building rather unimpressive and seriously lacking. The characters were to angsty, too bitchy and too cliche for my taste. I found that I couldn't relate or care for any of them. And they all reminded me of other high school drama characters. They were too basic in some ways.

The plot- well there is all this build up. And then it ends, not in a cliffhanger way. No. the book just ends. I am aware that it's supposed to make me wanna read the next book. But this achieved the opposite. I annoyed me. I felt cheated and it definitely made me rate this down rather than up.

The writing style is probably the most clever and best executed. This is written in a journal way - in POV of 5 different people. And each writing style was actually really distinctive and different. I think that's really fun. But I found it not as enjoyable to read for some reason. Don't ask me why. I would have sworn I would love it. It made reading this harder for some unexplainable reason.  Still I like the idea even if it didn't work for me personally

Honestly I wish I would have liked this better, but besides the fact that I didn't really enjoy the prose, this felt rather rough and badly executed. The abrupt end was the last straw for me, and I doubt that I will be reading the second book.

I guess fans of Gossip Girl and other similar book will enjoy this. It wasn't for me.

ARC was provided by Publishers through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

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