Book archived prior to archive date. I did not download ahead of time, unfortunately. Mistake won't be made in the future.

This was a bit of a middle road book for me compared to Lockhart's previous books. I thibk those who haven't enjoyed this have mostly been put off by the format and structure of the novel which I found intriguing - it more worjed than it didn't. Lockhart has made a speciality out of unreluable and inadequate narrators and this book is no exception. Enjoyable but not my favourite of the author's works.

I don't normally read YA, but really enjoyed We Were Liars by same author last year. Genuine Fraud is not quite in the same league as We Were Liars, but I still enjoyed this fast-paced, intense, dark story. I liked that the story was told in reverse - I've read other books that has used this technique, but not as successfully as this one. The author manages to build a lot of suspense in this way. The main character - Jule - is an extreme unreliable narrator with a very strong, unique voice . I wished we knew more about Jule's background and history as this would have helped me understand her behavior.

What a clever idea! Chapters going backwards in time. Not forward. Takes a little time to get your head round it. But then it’s brilliant and you won’t be disappointed.

I read this book in a day and I enjoyed it. It's nice to read a young adult book with a strong female protagonist who avoid clichés like "attractive but doesn't know it", or whose main agenda is to find a boyfriend. Jule is a traditional hero, like something from a Greek odyssey story, only female. It's refreshing to read.

There are patches in this novel where the plot feels over-explained, but the twist is satisfying and I'd happily read anything similar in style and theme.

At times confusing, but a very enjoyable read that kept me entertained throughout.

I desperately wanted to love this book, the concept was so intriguing and kept you guessing and wanting to shout at the book and ask her who she really was and what her plan was. However the chapters for me seemed to fly all over the place and as I was readin it I found myself confused and wasn’t sure what was happening. Unfortunately I did not make it to the end of this book.

I found this book very confusing and realised I was not the target audience. I am definitely not a young adult.
The story worked its way backwards and because I stopped and started reading I got lost in the story.
I am sure that young adult readers will like this book. The writing just flows seamlessly from one episode to another.
Highly recommended for young adult readers.

I warmed up to this after initially feeling the main character was too cold – but I was inevitably drawn in by the gorgeous weaving of the plot and completely masterful, gradual revelation of the story told backwards. Even if you're not a fan of beautiful plotting, however, this book is a gripping story of a dysfunctional girl who feels utterly justified in her actions because of what she's been through. Good for fans of Dexter, Breaking Bad, and of course We Were Liars.

Book Review
Title: Genuine Fraud
Author: E. Lockhart
Genre: YA/Romance/Thriller
Rating: ***
Review: After reading We were liars so long ago I have been dying to read more of E. Lockhart’s book and Genuine Fraud caught my eye. The opening chapter of Genuine Fraud was pretty good. we meet Jules who has been staying at the Playa Grande Resort in Baja for almost a month which was a little strange as she is only 18. Jules also seems to be hiding something as she doesn’t give people her real name, which immediately stood out to me. Jules seems to be friends with the bartender Donovan, but things get even stranger when the woman Jules meets in the gym; Noa knows she is American despite her best British accent which Jules believes means that Noa is a cop and leaves the hotel soon after. We learn that Jules parents were murdered many years before and a friend of the family spent the better part of a decade training Jules to get her revenge, this peaked my interested even more I love revenge stories – NEVERNIGHT! Despite being extremely able to take care of herself Jules longs for company and thinks often of Paolo and Imogen – her friends and maybe even lovers but for some reason she isn’t with them anymore. As she changes her look and name to disappear once more I was beginning to wonder why Jules is running on what or who she is running from. She very carefully books a flight to LA to throw off the possible police and plans to drive to Cancun and from there to Puerto Rico but when wakes up the following morning Noa is waiting for her. I realised after the first chapter that this novel is being told in reverse chronologically order, so the second chapter is set seven weeks prior to the first, and I have a feeling this is going to be a rollercoaster like the movie Memento.
As we approach the ¼ mark in the novel, we learn more about Imogen, who Jules considered her best friend, they are both orphans, but Imogen was someone who understood Jules and what she was going through. I loved the fact both Imogen and Jules are big readers especially novels with orphans. The life and friendship Jules had with Imogen was perfect in Jules’ eyes, they lived how they wanted without pressuring each other into conforming to society’s ideals. We also learn that Imogen committed suicide and her adoptive father Gil died from heart failure not long after and Jules is meeting with Imogen’s adoptive mother Patti. It is also here where the money issue I solved as Imogen was very rich and left her millions to Jules which she uses to fund her activities. It becomes clear in a few short months Jules has bounced through London and America before ending up in Mexico and slowly we are building a picture of Jules and her life, but we know there is more information to come as we back to February.
As we cross the ¼ mark in the novel, we see how Imogen’s death affects Jules and Imogen’s boyfriend; Forrest. However, we are also getting background on her boyfriend Paolo who has been backpacking around the world and when he returns to London she doesn’t want to see him, and I am wondering why. We can see that Jules has wrapped herself up in lies when Paolo refers to her as Imogen as if she tried to make Imogen’s life hers and after her death she can’t go on with it anymore. We learn they may be more than meets the eye around Imogen’s death as well as she supposedly died days before the suicide note was found and all Jules’ action seem planned out rather than in the moment. As we move backwards into the previous year, we learn about Jules’ history with Paolo and how she really liked him but she couldn’t come clean to him but she couldn’t be with him either.
As we approach the halfway mark in the novel, the picture of deception Jules has built makes it difficult to believe anything she says or does as the truth but all the while we are wondering why is she doing all of this.
As we cross into the second half of the novel, we learn that Jules did kill Brooke and it was passed off as an accident as she was drunk at the time, but we also learn that Jules has been using Imogen’s name for more than just boyfriends and it makes me think that she might have killed Imogen as well as stole her identity and has fooled everyone and killed anyone who became suspicious of her. The way everything is being revealed piece by little piece slowly changes our opinion on Jules and her shady life.
As we approach the ¾ mark in the novel, these suspicions are confirmed when we see the scene where Imogen confesses to Jules that despite liking her she doesn’t like the fact that Jules is becoming like her and pushing her to be someone she doesn’t want to be and when she tells Jules that she loves Forrest and wants to go back to him she kills her. She does this because she is in love with Imogen, although I felt she was more in love with what Imogen represented rather than the person Imogen was. After this scene we move back to where Imogen was alive and travelling with Jules, Brooke and Forrest at one of Imogen’s vacation homes when the pool boy Scott dies but I think this was a genuine suicide as he is sleeping with Imogen and when he asks her to pay off his debt and she refuses there was no other option for him, however, I wouldn’t put it past Jules to kill him after he upsets Imogen.
As we cross into the final section of the novel, we are beginning to see everything isn’t as clear cut as it seems neither Imogen or Jules were good people while Jules kills, Imogen manipulated people into doing whatever she wanted them to do. Shortly after this we move back to the end of June 2016 nearly a whole year before the start of the novel when Jules first meets Imogen and even this might have been set up by Jules and she might have never meet Imogen before in her life, but she manages to convince her that they went to the same high school. We see how it wasn’t Jules who started the dark path despite the fact she might have already been on it, I can clearly see Imogen manipulating Jules from the moment they meet one another they used each other, their relationship is toxic at best. It was enlightening to learn Jules meet Paolo before she’d officially meet Imogen and that she was planning to meet Imogen all along but the first time she’d used Imogen’s name was an accident but the confidence and power it gave her stuck.
In the final 30 pages of the novel, we learn Jules was asked by Imogen’s parents to go find her and makes sure she was alright after she dropped out of school. They did this because they thought she had attended the same school as Imogen which she hadn’t, but she adapts her life to fit her origin story. It turns out that Jules had taken a girl Lita’s identity and was spotted by Patti who installed the idea in Jules’ head that she had gone to the same school as Imogen and Jules just went along with it. As we get to the end or beginning of the novel depending on how you look at it, we learn that Jules had started low working in low paying jobs and just trying to make ends meet but borrows her friends identity when she is too hungover to work and because Jules can’t find a job she offers to go in her place starting her on the dark path we have been following. After all this time moving backwards we snap back to the present, where the woman Noa who Jules believes is a cop is outside her hotel room. Amazingly Jules doesn’t get caught and is free to continue doing what she has been doing all along.
Overall, I found the story to be very intriguing and it being told in reverse only added to this but I did feel that key aspects of Jules’ past and character very revealed too early in the story. Compared to E. Lockhart’s other novel We were liars, Genuine Fraud wasn’t as impactful or shocking in my opinion. I would still recommend for those looking for a good murder mystery, thriller YA novel but I personally rate We were liars higher.

I loved We Were Liars, so when I saw that E.Lockhart had a new book coming out, I was instantly excited by it.
Genuine Fraud did not let me down, even though I had high expectations going in.
What you get with this book is a dark, twisty story that will keep you guessing. With an incredibly interesting and unique narrative style, I found myself unable to set this book down.
The characters were all well thought-out and were brought to life incredibly well.
The pacing was spot on. I never found myself skimming over a chapter wanting to get back to the action, because there was always something going on, without seeming overly heavy on drama.
Truly, a fantastic read and I'd highly recommend it.

I didn't really like this story. The character was completely unlikeable and unrelatable in a way that other anti-heroes are not. It was very twisty and turny and kept me interested, which I guess is a good thing but other than that I could have done without reading this book...

I've seen a lot of mixed reviews for Genuine Fraud. I'm not sure if it's because people were expecting another We Were Liars or because the story is told in reverse order but personally? I loved it. It's almost a Ripley for a new generation with plenty of twists and turns, all of which thoroughly confuse you until you're not sure whether you're meant to be rooting for Jule or wanting to see her get her comeuppance. I loved the ending and could quite cheerfully read more to see what happened next!

Wow - Amazingly gripping book! Took a while for me to get into it only because it started in the present day and then the rest of the book was how she got to be there... The story is about Jules and Imogen who are best friends - it's hard to tell you anymore without giving any of the plot away. I really enjoyed this and think it would be a great holiday read and have heard that it is being made into a film ! Fab book.

Jule is 18 and staying alone at a hotel in Mexico. She speaks with an English accent and calls herself Imogen - who is Jule? And why is she pretending to be Imogen? Who is Imogen? Someone may know that Jule is lying, so she goes on the run.

Going into this I thought it'd be a quick, quirky read based on the other E.Lockhart books I've read (and enjoyed). Initially, it was just that - fast, action-packed, with an interesting, independent female lead. We start off in 2017 and go backwards to see how Jule ended up there. But there's where it got confusing for me - the story kept going backwards, and I ended up a bit lost. I'm still not entirely sure who Jule is, what motivates her, or why Imogen. I wish I'd kept proper notes for this one.

It's a fast read, and Jule is intriguing, but I'd almost need to read it again to understand it properly.

Although I enjoyed Genuine Fraud; I did find it confusing at first because of the reverse telling of the story.. Once I got used to the writing style I did enjoy it and it kept my attention. However, I do feel it's not one of E. Lockharts best.

From the author of the unforgettable New York Times bestseller We Were Liars comes a masterful new psychological suspense novel--the story of a young woman whose diabolical smarts are her ticket into a charmed life. But how many times can someone reinvent themselves? You be the judge.

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.



After reading Lockhart's We Were Liars a few years back, I was excited -to say the least- to read her latest work. Unfortunately, Genuine Fraud failed to live up to the expectations created both by Lockhart's previous work and by its summary. In short, it's just not as exciting as it promises to be.

To be honest, the only thing I enjoyed about the book was its narration. The story was told in a reverse chronological order that a) allowed the author to show off some writing skills, and b) added some mystery to an otherwise quite predictable story. As soon as I had familiarized myself enough with the characters' names and the time-frame, I found it quite easy to guess what had happened. But even that didn't make me excited or eager to see what's next. I was, overall, simply uninterested. 

The characters themselves seemed to hold enough potential; in a sense that demanded readers interested enough to pay close attention to them, to try to figure out their motives and their desires. Unfortunately, since I was so uninterested in the overall story, I just couldn't bring myself to care about them enough to perform a close character study. 

The one feeling I couldn't shake throughout the entire book was that Genuine Fraud could be brilliantly translated into the big screen, that this particular story and way of storytelling would be much more suitable for a screenplay, rather than a book. It was a book that, sadly, lacked any sort of spark, intriguing plot twists, or compelling arc. 



**An ARC was provided in exchange for an honest review.**

This book opens with a young woman who is clearly on the run, using a stolen identity and works backwards so you can find out how she came to be living it up in a luxury Mexican island and using her friend's name and documents. The story is told in reverse, and is full of twists and turns as you begin to piece together the how, what and whys. It's frustrating in places as you lose the threads of the story, and just as you think you've got a handle on what Jules is up to, the explanation is pulled out from under you. But that's kind of the joy of it. It's a wild ride of a book, and a quick read; if you want a little bit of escapism and a little bit of suspense then this is the one for you.

Although this book clever, intriguingly structure, suspenseful and interesting, I did feel slightly detached throughout. Yet, that kind of did go with the tone of the novel. It was told in the episodic style that was revolving backwards, meaning that we learnt about something before knowing the significance of it in a different style. To get the best use out of this, I've probably got to reread the book so that I can see some of the smaller plot devices I might have missed. An excepted read though, over all.