To Be Perfectly Honest: A Novel Based on an Untrue Story by Sonya Sones - Review

To Be Perfectly Honest: A Novel Based on an Untrue Story
by Sonya Sones
Publication Date: August 27, 2013
Published by: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Pages: 496
Source: ARC from Simon and Schuster via Edelweiss
Purchase: Amazon

My name is Colette.

This book is about

me.

Who am I?

To be perfectly honest,

I’m not exactly sure who I am.

I guess you could say                                                                 

I’m the fifteen-year-old daughter                   

of an annoyingly famous movie star.

Or maybe

I’m the eighteen-year-old daughter

of a famous movie star’s stand-in.

Or maybe

I’m the thousand-year-old daughter

of a vampire…

Having trouble guessing

which one of these stories is true?

Join the club.

My friends

have a joke about me:

How can you tell if Colette is lying?

Her mouth is open.

My Thoughts 

If you are ever on the lookout for a book with an unreliable narrator, then To Be Perfectly Honest: A Novel Based on an Untrue Story is the book for you. Colette will let you know she is a liar, a storyteller, an unreliable narrator and will gladly claim that title. 

The story will completely mess with your mind if you let it. As I read it, I questioned everything that was happening to the characters. Was anything true? Was it all just a story? Of course it is just a story written by the author, but did the author write about a character who was making up a story to make her life seem more interesting? Did the character really go through these things? Is she who she says she is? It really threw me for a loop because when I would think the character was sharing a story that sounded like something that could really happen, she would go off on a tangent or embellish events or moments because that was how she wanted them to happen. 

  

What I think Sonya Sones really hits on is: Is it ever OK to tell a lie? How harmful is a little lie such as telling a waiter it's your birthday so you can get free dessert? Is that really so bad? Why do we lie in the first place? To get attention. To make people like us. Because we're bored. To hide a secret. To get revenge. And she makes the reader question - how far is too far to take a lie?

I'm a fan of Sonya's books and her characters. And while To Be Perfectly Honest won't rank as a favorite from her, with all of it's confusing twists and turns and finally the truth, at least I think it was the truth, it was fun to read. It was so fun that I've already read it twice.

Disclaimer: I requested and received the book for review from Simon and Schuster via Edelweiss and I was not compensated in any way for providing a review. Thoughts and opinions are my own.