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Review: This Side of Jealousy (The Innocents #2) by Lili Peloquin

8/22/2013




Think about what you love about a great soap opera, daytime or nighttime variety. Well, whatever you came up with, this book has in spades: Lies! Revenge! Secrets! Love! Sex! Betrayal! Mystery! MURDER!  You have your good guys and your bad guys. You have your good girls and your oh so bad girls.  This is soapy, campy, fun at its best.  I’ve never seen the television show Revenge, but I’d like to think it’s a lot like this book series.

The second installment picks up right where we left off in the last book.  It covers about a week in the drama-filled lives of a cast of over-privileged teens.  It is also once again told from alternating point of views between the two sisters, Alice and Charlie.  While once again, Alice is the star of the show, Charlie’s role continues to be a bit confusing.  I don’t know how her P.O.V. fits into the overall arc and mystery of the books, but her scenes are always good for some juicy drama.  As in the first book each character is pretty fleshed out, even the secondary characters.  You may not like them, but you kind of know them. 

The pacing of this book is my favorite kind: nice and quick.  There is nothing dragging this book down.  The plot flows and the wording is quick, making it easy to speed right through it.  There is no time for stopping and contemplating the deeper meaning behind the word choices, because there really doesn’t appear to be any deeper meaning.  Nobody is having an existential crisis here.  The reader certainly won’t have one either. 

I enjoyed how the overall plot moved forward in this installment in the series.  The reader gets some questions answered, and new questions are asked.  The characters all seem to grow a little. Well, as much as their natural shallowness allows them to.  The overarching mystery also seems much closer to being solved.  Is the story a bit predictable?  Well, yes.  But that’s o.k.  Ultimately, this is a book and not a TV show that relies on a major cliffhanger and needs to bring up something out of nowhere to keep the viewer interested.  There is a finite end to this series (I hope).  So while I think I know what is going to happen at the end of the series, I’m o.k. with that.  I am just enjoying the ride.

This book is what it is.  It will not change your life.  It will not make you think.  But it will provide enjoyment.  It’s ultimately the perfect summer read: fun, quick, and entertaining. 

3.5/5 footballs


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