YVO’S SHORTIES #189 – Dead Girls Don’t Lie & Beach Read

Time for another round of Yvo’s Shorties! This time around a TBR jar pick and a new release belonging to different genres… Dead Girls Don’t Lie sadly ended up being a miss for me, but I’m happy to say that Beach Read most definitely lived up to the hype for me.

Title: Dead Girls Don’t Lie
Author: Jennifer Shaw Wolf
Genre: YA, Mystery, Thriller
First published: September 17th 2013
Publisher: Walker Childrens
Finished reading: November 11th 2020
Pages: 352

“Everyone is equal, right? Just some people are more equal than others.”

It has been months since my TBR jar decided it was about time for me to finally read Dead Girls Don’t Lie, but somehow I never actually picked it up until now. The blurb sounded interesting enough, and I was curious about it, but I guess in the end my instincts did smell something funny and made me look in the other direction for months. Don’t get me wrong; it is not necessarily a bad read, but most of it turned out to be just so darn cliche! Sure, the ending came as a surprise, but overall there were so many cliches involved, both relating to high school, teenage relationships and immigrant talk (some even felt a bit racist?!)… Especially the way the Mexican community was described and Eduardo’s constant use of ‘boba‘ was a really turn off for me, but that might just be a personal thing. The characters themselves fell rather flat for me, or were at least partly described with cliches and weren’t exactly easy to connect to as a result. What I thought was going to be an investigation into Rachel’s death turned out to be a rather bland and slow journey packed with cliche references to Mexican gangs and high school jocks and students. Dead Girls Don’t Lie didn’t end up being my cup of tea at all, but if you enjoy the genre and don’t mind cliches/bland characters/a slower pace, this story might work better for you.

Title: Beach Read
Author: Emily Henry
Genre: Contemporary, Romance
First published: May 19th 2020
Publisher: Berkley
Finished reading: November 12th 2020
Pages: 384

“Happy endings don’t matter if the getting there sucks.”

I’ve honestly been a bit hesitant to pick up my copy of Beach Read. There has been a lot of hype around this title, and you all know how hyped books and me tend to get along… But my curiosity won in the end and I just couldn’t help myself reading it despite the sometimes mixed reviews. And guess what? Beach Read turned out to be an exception to the rule and I loved my time with this story! I’m glad of the warnings this wasn’t going to be a light read though, because I would definitely have expected a romcom judged by the cover… But I think I liked what I found even more. Both January and Gus managed to grow on me quite quickly and I loved the bookish element in Beach Read. Sure, there might be some cliches involved and I felt like the whole ‘enemy to lover‘ trope didn’t reach its full potential, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that this was exactly the kind of story I was craving. Heavier topics and sad moments are mixed with lighter ones and I loved the banter between January and Gus. And to my surprise the sexy scenes didn’t even bother me that much, which once again proves I can tolerate them as long as they are written in a certain way… I also liked how everything wrapped up in the end, although I do admit the secondary characters lacked fleshing out a bit. Still, as a whole Beach Read is without a doubt one of my romance highlights of the year and I do hope she will write more similar stories in the future as I like the way she writes her romance.