The Breakfast Club meets Pretty Little Liars, One of Us Is Lying is the story of what happens when five strangers walk into detention and only four walk out alive. Everyone is a suspect, and everyone has something to hide.

Pay close attention and you might solve this.

On Monday afternoon, five students at Bayview High walk into detention.

Bronwyn, the brain, is Yale-bound and never breaks a rule.

Addy, the beauty, is the picture-perfect homecoming princess.

Nate, the criminal, is already on probation for dealing.

Cooper, the athlete, is the all-star baseball pitcher.

And Simon, the outcast, is the creator of Bayview High's notorious gossip app.

Only, Simon never makes it out of that classroom. Before the end of detention, Simon's dead. And according to investigators, his death wasn't an accident. On Monday, he died. But on Tuesday, he'd planned to post juicy reveals about all four of his high-profile classmates, which makes all four of the suspects in his murder. Or are they the perfect patsies for a killer who's still on the loose?

Everyone has secrets, right? What really matters is how far you would go to protect them.

Okay, it’s time to talk about how this book completely blew up my two remaining brain cells and left me drooling and aggressively shipping Nate and Bronwyn. I love it so much when I don’t expect much from the book but then it proves me wrong and makes me feel like an asshole I am for doubting its wonderful existence :,)

I always love a book that moves me and I feel like every good book should tend to do so for its reader. One of Us Is Lying did that to me. Not only did it cause waves, no, TSUNAMIS, of emotion but also a sense of fulfillment and nostalgia after I finished it. The struggle of keeping a secret is real, especially if you have to keep it from your loved ones. But how can you keep your secrets safe if your life is constantly monitored for a set-up murder?

This book did damn interesting and intriguing that I don’t even know where to start. At first, I kind of thought it will be one of those classic amateur detective mystery novels, but right after the things got in motion, I knew there was something else going on there xd. McManus definitely knows how to attract her audience with a promising story idea and even better realization, and writing that makes it impossible to stay out of this high-school drama and mystery swirl. Amazing plot, cool characters, and murder investigation make it similar to Pretty Little Liars (only this is actually mind blowing and not debilitating, sorry PLL)

So, Bayview High is almost as any other high-school, except there, any mistake you make could ruin you. Namely, Simon Kelleher is a weird kid with no friends and eternal wish to belong who started an app called About That where he posts gossip and spills secret about everything he finds out – and he finds out a lot. One Monday, five students enter detention from which Simon doesn’t come out alive. What initially seemed like an accident, turned out to be a well-planned murder. A few days after that a post appears on a Tumblr blog, written in name of Simon’s murderer, causing a series of questions for police, and all students who are blamed for his death. How does a person writing a blog know all those things? Who planted the phones to Nate, Cooper, Bronwyn, and Addy so they ended up in detention? And most importantly, who left peanut oil in the cup Simon was going to drink from and caused the allergic reaction that killed him? The problem is, most of the kids in school really, really hated Simon.

This book doesn’t cover just unraveling a crime, but also a process of four teenagers, all obviously different and everyone with something to hide, getting together and trying to find what is missing in among the suspicious circumstances of Simon’s death. I always love reading about American high schools and the way things work there, but this one hit me pretty hard, especially because it covered different types of students from different classes and with various “positions” in high school life. Not only their fellow students, but the whole media community has come upon them for something they might have or might have not done, and turned their lives into a stressful nightmare for public entertainment. It’s funny how a single mistake can dictate how the rest of your life might go.

The story is told from the perspective of four characters, and every single one of them is amazing. I don’t feel like McManus went into depths of each character, but that didn’t stop her from developing them not only for the purpose of the plot but also as four lovable characters.

Bronwyn is ambitious and adorable grade A student, trying hard to live up to her parents’ expectations and doing everything to protect her sister. Nate’s a local criminal and drug dealer with a soft spot for Bronwyn. His father is drunk and useless and his mother with bipolar disorder left him when he was fourteen, so he kind of learned how to take care of himself.


Cooper’s a perfect son and a perfect jock with his perfect girlfriend and perfect friends, but when his big secret comes out, his world becomes way more harder to live in. And there’s Addy, but I didn’t like her as much and hove literally nothing to write about her xd