To Be Perfectly Honest: A Novel Based on an Untrue Story - Hardcover

Sones, Sonya

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689876041 ISBN 13: 9780689876042

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2013

Synopsis

Can honesty lead to heartbreak if the truth is subjective? A compelling novel in verse from Sonya Sones.

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...

About this title

About the Author

Sonya Sones has written five YA novels-in-verse: To Be Perfectly Honest (A Novel Based on an Untrue Story), Stop Pretending, One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies, What My Mother Doesn’t Know, and its companion, What My Girlfriend Doesn’t Know. Her books have received many honors, including a Christopher Award, the Myra Cohn Livingston Poetry Award, and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize nomination. But the coolest honor she ever got was when What My Mother Doesn’t Know made it onto the American Library Association’s list of the Top 100 Most Banned Books of the Decade (to see why, see p.46). She lives near the beach in southern California, and only tells the occasional fib. Visit her at SonyaSones.com or follow @SonyaSones on Twitter.

From School Library Journal

Gr 9 Up–This coming-of-age novel in verse features Colette, a spunky, untrustworthy narrator whose schoolmates like to joke, “How can you tell/if Colette is lying?/Her mouth/is open.” Readers will root for the teen as she struggles under the shadow of her beautiful, movie-star mother whose permissive parenting style is equally neglectful. But all is not as it seems, as readers are taken on a roller coaster of truth and lies. By “reinventing reality,” Colette creates her own world because, in her words, “my actual life/sucks.” Cheeky Colette is well matched by her precocious younger brother. The siblings are forced to follow their mother “on location” to a small town where the week's main excitement is the farmers' market. In “the armpit/of the universe!” Colette meets Connor, for whom she feels a passion that she will struggle to rein in, much like her indulgence in lying. Sones captures the ache of first love. Readers may find themselves laughing, crying, and wanting to believe the unreliable, well-developed narrator. Excerpts may make for a stepping stone to William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Like Shakespeare's play, this title lends itself to discussion about healthy relationships, setting limits, defining oneself, and evaluating what is real. Fast paced and great for reluctant readers.–Teresa Pfeifer, The Springfield Renaissance School, Springfield, MAα(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0689876041
• ISBN 13: 9780689876042
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 496