Lies I Told

March 2, 2015
Seventeen-year-old Grace endured the foster care system for years until a pair of thieves adopted her, employing Grace and her older brother, Parker, for their cons. Ever since, Grace has spent four months in one place, five months in another, changing her name, personality, and friends in service of her parents’ schemes. Now the family has landed in Playa Hermosa, Calif., gearing up for their greatest con yet—snagging $20 million in gold bars, hidden in the house of a local family. Grace’s job is to get close to handsome Logan Fairchild to find out where they keep the gold, and Zink (the Prophecy of the Sisters trilogy) builds significant tension as Grace begins to fall for her mark and make real friends, throwing her loyalties and decision-making into flux. It’s a gripping, edgy thriller that’s driven as much by the internal conflicts of its sympathetic heroine as by the threats that the con will come crashing down around Grace and her family. A dramatic 11th-hour twist will leave readers eager for more. Ages 13–up. Agent: Steven Malk, Writers House.

January 1, 2015

Gr 9 Up-Fans of romance and a good heist will fall in love with Lies I Told. Grace is a foster child who has been adopted by a pair of con artists, and they are the closest thing she has to a real family. Her brother, another adopted foster child, is finding the life of constant deception increasingly unsatisfactory. He's ready to get out, and he wants Grace to come with him. Parker's entreaties would be more successful if Grace wasn't falling irrevocably in love with their newest mark. Zink uses a fabulous vocabulary to build a tale of deception and mixed loyalties that effortlessly draws readers in and allows them to vicariously experience the tension of living a lie while trying to be completely transparent with a love interest. The victims of the graft are sympathetic characters, and Grace can be forgiven her deception since she must make an untenable choice between first love and familial abandonment or betrayal of a truly good person and an artificial family. Zink liberally includes the palpitating hearts and more mature, steamy love scenes that many young adult readers have come to expect in an action-packed tale, but leaves her readers dangling with an ending that will leave them demanding more.-Jodeana Kruse, R. A. Long High School, Longview, WA

Copyright 2015 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2015
A girl struggles to hold onto her own identity within her family of thieves. Grace disobeys her parents by keeping mementos from her family's previous criminal jobs. She hopes she hasn't completely become the deceptive creature her parents trained her to be from the time they adopted her as a young teen. Now 17, Grace has moved with her family to an affluent area as part of a plot to steal millions in gold from Warren Fairchild, a wildly wealthy but mentally unstable man. Her parents assign Grace to get close to Logan, Fairchild's son, a task she finds only too easy, as she and Logan truly fall for each other. Grace likes her new friends in Playa Hermosa, making one truly good friend for the first time in her life, her family having moved incessantly to keep up with jobs and ahead of the police. She lives with the realization that she must lie to these good people constantly, and she knows she must betray Logan, whom she loves. Zink deftly weaves the story together, employing foreshadowing and symbolism to support the plot. Although readers know from the prologue that things will turn out badly, suspense ripples throughout the story. Grace's character blooms as she balances between the good person she hopes to be and the bad one she's forced to be. Highly readable, gripping and touching. (Thriller. 12-18)

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March 1, 2015
Grades 8-11 Grace and Parker were adopted by a couple of con artists. Their cobbled-together family moves from state to state, integrating themselves into wealthy communities, learning the habits of their marks, and then robbing them blind. But the strain of leading this duplicitous life begins to send fissures through the family, and as their double-dealing house of cards comes crashing down around them, Grace's deepening feelings for the handsome Logan, her assigned mark, only make the situation more complicated and wrenching. Grace is a complex and compelling character. Her parents give her a true sense of belonging, something that was missing while she was in the foster system. But what she fails to recognize, and what causes increasing conflict between her and Parker, is that by making the teens complicit in a series of long cons, her adoptive parents are being psychologically abusive, ultimately destroying Grace's ability to have any real friendships or relationships. The sense of foreboding that pervades the novel explodes at the end, with irreparable damage to everyone. An addictive read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)