Genuine Fraud

3.5 stars

This book messed with my mind. Really, seriously messed with my mind.
Honestly, I can't even decide whether I liked it. It was super interesting, and twisty, and well written. And I'm glad I read it for sure. But did I like it? I'm still not entirely sure.

Genuine Fraud was a really unique book. The story was told backwards, starting at chapter eighteen, then working it's way down to chapter one. Because of this, you have absolutely zero clue what on earth is going on (Also, if you're like me, you think you have a defective audiobook). Slowly though, you're able to put together the puzzle.
I LOVED the way the story was told! It was so unique, and I thoroughly enjoyed putting it all together.

My feelings on the characters however show more were... not so great. They were well developed. Very well developed. But... I hated them all.
Jule was awful. I really hated her, and I couldn't root for her. I can't really say much, because SPOILERS, but she was terrible. Ugh ugh ugh.
Imogen was... not much better. I mean, she was significantly better, but I didn't really like her much more. When she first came in, I thought she was lovely. By the end, I couldn't stand her, and I thought she was a spoiled brat.
Forrest, Imogen's boyfriend, was a total jerk. He thought he was so much better than everybody else, and oh I hated him so much.
The only character I liked was Paolo. He was actually really nice, and I liked him a lot. But he wasn't really in it at all. I think he was in it three times. I really wanted to see more of him, and I was disappointed not to.

I was also annoyed by the ending. It was really open ended. I don't mind when books are open ended, but this one was ridiculously open ended. Like, NOTHING got resolved. And I was mad, because I felt like Jule didn't deserve as good an ending as she got. I really hate her, in case you couldn't tell.

So, I loved the plot, and the characters were well done, and I enjoyed the book in general. I had some things I didn't like, but overall, it was a good book. show less

It's well-written but I liked it better when it was called The Talented Mr. Ripley.

EDITED: Okay. I just knocked a star off because I've now had time to think about the plot and it is so wildly implausible. By her own admission, Jule does not look that much like Imogene and, yet, she's been able to masquerade as her for how long? In this day and age, with airport security being what it is? She murders multiple people and gets away with it? No one investigates Brooke's death, even though the wounds from being whacked in the head with a lion statue and those from falling and hitting one's head on some rocks wouldn't be the same. And Jule manages to get the drop on a highly-trained cop and get her gun away from her? Nope. Nope. Nope-ity show more nope nope nope.I am all for suspension of disbelief, but I want an author to make some effort to make even the most convoluted and implausible plot seem, well, plausible. The events of this book might have been possible 15 years ago, but not now—at least not in the way they're written. But, credit to e. lockhart for telling this impossible tale in a way that swept me along in spite of the occasional headshaking huh? wha? and my absolute dislike of EVERY. SINGLE. CHARACTER. show less

This was my first E. Lockhart book, but I am pretty sure it won't be my last. Genuine Fraud was an intense read, and I whizzed through it as I just could not put it down. I had so many questions, and a burning curiosity to understand what was going on... and just who Jule and Imogen are. This is a book filled with twists and turns and surprises just around the corner: while definitely enjoyable, that makes it incredibly hard to review this book without spoilers, which is why this review will probably be much shorter than usual.

I deeply enjoyed reading this book: it was fast-paced and full of suspense, and even though I had suspected a few of the twists from fairly early on, it kept me guessing myself right up to the end. The narrator is show more deeply unreliable, and none of the characters can be trusted, which makes this read even more delicious to devour in few sittings if (like me) you like working your brain to understand twisted relationships.

I have to admit, none of the characters were particularly (read: at all) likable: most of them are spoilt rich kids who do little more than travel, shop and enjoy themselves, while complaining about how miserable they are. They were, however, extremely well drawn, and while I disliked them profoundly, I found them to be very believable. Most of the stuff that happened appeared to me fairly unrealistic anyway, but overall worked well within the novel, so that I almost never questioned how a particular thing could be happening.

One thing I wasn't too convinced by was the way in which it was narrated. The story is told almost entirely backwards, starting with an event and working our way to how it all started. I thought this was a brilliant and very original way to tell a story, until I actually got into the book. While I liked the theory of it, I found reading backwards to be much too complicated for me, and I soon started feeling slightly confused and ended up losing track of some details. This was entirely me, though, and you might enjoy it greatly and not feel confused at all!

Overall, this was a very entertaining read, and would have been perfect if it hadn't managed to thoroughly confuse me after a while.

I received an e-arc of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley. This did not affect my opinion of the book in any way. show less

Jule West-Williams is running from something. She affects a British accent, wears wigs, steals passports, and pays for everything with cash. Jule seems pretty comfortable staying at a Mexican resort until a woman strikes up a conversation. Suddenly, that woman (who turns out to be a cop) is following her even when she thought she was stealthy. What is she running from and who is chasing her?

Genuine Fraud is one of the most unique teen thrillers that I've read. So many fall into the same tropes (a teen having an affair with a teacher, a love triangle, a new friend to be jealous of, etc etc.) that they blend together in my mind. This one doesn't fall into any of those tropes and stands apart from those thrillers. The book is told show more backwards. It took a bit to get used to and figure out what was happening in what order. I spent way too long looking at the dates trying to figure out the pattern, which is that each chapter backs up one month. Once I got it, the story flowed more freely for me.

Jule is a bit of an enigma for most of the book. She imagines herself as a bad ass secret agent, but we don't know her situation until the end. Her view is completely clouded by her fantasies, making her narrative completely unreliable. My view of her changed as the novel traveled backwards in time. At the beginning of the novel, Jule seems to be some sort of heiress with unlimited funds for resorts, luxuries, disguises, and payoffs. Then the police are following her and my mind races with possibilities. Her true origin is much less glamorous. I love how the story reveals the mystery, introduces characters, and uncovers twists and turns bit by bit.

Genuine Fraud is a surprising book that seems more adult than its YA marketing. The cover makes it seem like some sort of fluffy contemporary romance. Everyone involved is college age and I think it might have been better received as an adult thriller. There's a missing heiress, her jealous boyfriend, and Jule somehow fitting into it all. As thrillers go, this one surprised me and kept me guessing all the way to the end. It's a short book that only took me a day to read and it's definitely worth your time. show less

Genuine Fraud is the first work by Emily Lockhart I've read and it certainly won't be the last. This thriller starts at Chapter 18 and moves back in time towards Chapter 1 before ending at 19. This regressive narration, instead of killing the mystery, makes the reader turn the pages to know how and why whatever has happened has happened. The main characters are unpredictable, complicated, and seriously messed up in the head.
This fast moving novel grabbed my attention from the word go and held it till the very end. In spite of some parts that defy logic and some easy coincidences, this is a book I enjoyed very much.

When it comes to reading, if you mix YA with the thriller genre, I am so there! So it was no surprise that I was drawn to a book with Single White Female vibes about a weird, obsessive friendship between two young women. Especially when it is written by the author of one of the most hyped YA thrillers of the last few years. But as much as I wanted to love this book, I just wasn't all that "thrilled" by it (say thriller again!).

The premise and the writing are both solid and I love the Memento-like way the book is written. The characters, while unlikable, are compelling and realistic. All huge checks in the positives column. I feel like this is the perfect easy read to sit down with and read on the beach or by a snowy window (which is show more where I've been reading it) and can easily be tackled in a weekend.

The issues I have arise during the concluding third of the novel. The biggest problem with writing a book in flashback is that you already know the twists and major plot points for the most part, so all of the lead up material that you'd typically read at the beginning of the novel is now at the end and it has to be impeccable. Otherwise, you end up feeling confused and let down by the initial catalyst and character motivations.

With every chapter that I counted down, I expected to come across some great revelation that explained exactly why things had happened as they did, but that revelation never really came. Or, at least, it didn't come in a way that gave me a real "a-ha" moment. And since I don't think this novel would have worked as well if it had been told in your typical chronological order, I can only say that, for me, Genuine Fraud felt sort of like, well, a fraud. Or, as the old phrase goes, WHERE'S THE BEEF?

It really isn't a bad book, but as a seasoned reader of thrillers, Genuine Fraud was really just a Genuine Meh. 3 out of 5 stars. show less

I mentioned a book on this blog this summer called “The Talented Mr. Ripley”. It’s a deeply unsettling thriller about a man named Tom Ripley who befriends a wealthy playboy, only to kill him and take on his identity. It’s super messed up and a very fun read, and I think that many of the more recent psychopaths as protagonists characters owe a lot to Patricia Highsmith, who created the character. So when I started to read “Genuine Fraud” by E. Lockhart, it didn’t take long for me to pick up on the fact that this book is a genderbent version of that story. Throw in a little bit of timeline tweaking that starts at the end for good measure, and you have the newest novel from the author of “We Were Liars”, with more coastal show more scenes and protagonists that you aren’t sure that you can really trust.

I do like it when YA authors experiment with structure and plotting, so to see that it started at the end was a great way to start this book. We start with Jule, who has taken on the identity of her best friend Imogen, a flighty heiress who was as aimless as she was charming. We don’t know what happened to Imogen, only that she is dead, and Jule is pretending to be her. Just as it seems she’s about to be arrested for some sort of crime (fraud? something worse?), we go backwards in time. And then we go further backwards. As we go back more and more, the pieces start to come into place, not only about who Jule is, who Imogen was, how they found each other, and how everything went wrong… plus the collateral damage along the way. We kind of get a sense for Jule and who she is, but she is definitely the definition of unreliable. Things that are said about her may not be the truth, and certainly things she tells other people probably aren’t. The backwards structure was a really neat way to get some of the facts, foreshadowing to events that happened before the moment that you are reading about. You forge thoughts and attitudes towards characters, but then as you shift backwards through the story your attitude changes and you see them in completely new ways. The more I see this device, the more I come to appreciate it, to be sure. It also made it so that I had a hard time putting this book down, needing to take any down time to keep going to find out what happened. It was such a fast and engrossing read that I consumed most of it in one sitting, and then stayed up probably far too late, battling sleep, just to see how it all turned out. There is no denying that the pacing and the little smattering of clues throughout the pages made this a very fun read.

But the problem that I had with it is that it is most certainly borrowing a lot from “The Talented Mr. Ripley”. I’m sure that it’s meant to be an homage to this classic story of obsessive friendship, identity theft, and murder, but there were a number of parallels that felt more like lifting plot points instead of honoring them. The close friend who has always been suspicious of the interloper. The lover who is being played like a harp. The parent who reaches out because their child has ditched responsibility in favor of carelessness. An incident in a boat with an OAR (my God, this basically played out the same way in “Ripley” as it did here). The list goes on. For the target audience, that isn’t going to really make much of a difference. For them Imogen won’t be Dickie Greenleaf and Jule won’t be Tom Ripley, but in my mind I couldn’t separate the characters in this book from the ones that they appear to be modeled after. I think that perhaps if it had been made a bit more clear that this was, in fact, a genderbent retelling with a different structure I would have been more thrilled by it, but instead it was frustrating because I would always be thinking ‘well that was just what Highsmith did’.

All that said, it’s undeniable that “Genuine Fraud” was an entertaining read. Definitely the kind of book that will keep you guessing and keep you completely obsessed with it. I would be curious to see if Lockhart will be following it up with other stories about Jule. After all, since this is an homage to Tom Ripley, it’s important to note that he had a whole series dedicated to him and his exploits. I’d probably read more about Jule, just as I’ve always meant to with regards to Tom Ripley. show less