To Be Perfectly Honest by Sonya Sones

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Publication Date: July 27th 2013
Pages: 496
Source: ALA Annual
Genre: Contemporary, Verse
Goodreads

Her friends
have a joke about her:
How can you tell if Colette is lying?

Her mouth is open.

Fifteen-year-old Colette is addicted to lying. Her shrink says this is because she’s got a very bad case of Daughter-of-a-famous-movie-star Disorder—so she lies to escape out from under her mother’s massive shadow. But Colette doesn’t see it that way. She says she lies because it’s the most fun she can have with her clothes on. Not that she’s had that much fun with her clothes off. At least not yet, anyway…

When her mother drags her away from Hollywood to spend the entire summer on location in a boring little town in the middle of nowhere, Colette is less than thrilled. But then she meets a sexy biker named Connor. He’s older, gorgeous, funny, and totally into her. So what if she lies to him about her age, and about who her mother is? I mean, she has to keep her mother’s identity a secret from him. If he finds out who she really is, he’ll forget all about Colette, and start panting and drooling and asking her for her mother’s autograph. Just like everyone always does.

But what Colette doesn’t know is that Connor is keeping a secret of his own…

To be perfectly honest I had no idea what kind of book this was going to be when I picked it up. This book is told in verse and tells the story of the summer of a liar. I've only read one other book in verse before, and it was of a much more serious topic than this one, so I was curious to see how I would feel about it. I have some mixed feelings about this book, but I though it was a fun, enjoyable story that I was able to read in a matter of hours.

This book starts off with the narrator lying to the readers and going onto explain how lying is in her- Colette's- blood. When starting the story it is highlighted how you can never tell whether what Colette is saying is fact or fiction. During the first few chapters it is hard to decipher if what she is saying is true or not, but that only lasts for the first 30 or so pages. At a certain point the narrator's lies start to repeat themselves, over the same topic, making it fairly easy to tell when a lie is in action. About 100 or so pages in Colette stops giving lies to the reader, which is both positive and negative. The story might have been more interesting if more lies that weren't so transparent had been present throughout the story, like it had been suggested there would be at the beginning of the story, though it was nice that the repetitive lies were not being presented again and again.

The narrator, Colette, was a fairly whiny character. Most of the lies she told seemed to have little or no motive, and some were just plain annoying. It seemed like she made some of her lies just to hurt someone later on. There was some major character growth by the end of the story though, and she became an easier character to like. One of the funnest characters in this story was Colette's little  brother, who had an adorable lisp that was written in throughout the story. The last major character in this book is Colette's summer love interest, Connor. Connor never seemed like a completely trust worthy character in the first place, but eventually he reveals a secret that changes the whole story. I want to rant about his character more, but it would give away way too much of the book.

The setting was cute and summer, fulled with several fun summertime activities and adventures. I enjoyed reading about everything the characters did together on their vacation near the beach, and watching everything unfold in such an interesting landscape.

The ending was quite unrealistic. It wasn't a terrible ending, but in the end Colette has a sudden epiphany that totally changes her as a person, and I'm not a fan of those kinds of endings, they seem rushed and quite honestly kind of weak. I would have preferred a different way to close the story.