Review: Deception by Lee Nichols

Deception

By Lee Nichols

Publication date: June 8, 2020

I won this in a contest

4 stars

Summary from Goodreads…

When Emma Vaile's parents leave on mysterious business trip, it gives her the perfect excuse to be a rebellious teen. Throw some parties, get a tattoo (or maybe just a piercing), and enjoy the first few weeks of her junior year. Then her best friend stops talking to her, the cops crash her party, and Emma finds herself in the hands of a new guardian—her college-age "knight in J.Crew armor," Bennett Stern—and on a plane to his museum-like mansion in New England.
After enrolling at Thatcher Academy, Emma settles in by making friends with the popular legacy crowd. But she can't shake the strange visions that are haunting her. She has memories of Thatcher she can't explain, as if she's returning home to a place she's never been. Emma doesn't trust anyone anymore—except maybe Bennett. But he's about to reveal a ghostly secret to Emma. One that will explain the visions . . . and make Emma fear for her life.

I ended up really liking this book! And why am I excited about that? Well, for the first hundred pages or so, I wasn’t really sure I was GOING to like it. Don’t get me wrong, it was very readable and I found myself tearing through the pages BUT I had a couple of issues. First of all, the story is told in first person point of view which amounted to a whole lot of “I did this and then he did and then I did this and then he did that.” And the sentences were very short. You know how in elementary school you are taught that a sentence needs a noun and a verb? That’s all a lot of these sentences amounted to so it took me a while to get used to the writing style.

Secondly, the way Emma ended up “in the hands of a new guardian” seemed a little bit forced to me. It was a a big convoluted mess of a way for her to get there that could have been handled a heckuva lot easier and a lot more believably by the characters involved. I’m asking for believability in paranormal fiction? Well, yeah! If I’m gonna get into a story involving ghosts or anything else supenatural, I wanna believe in the world that’s being created. And if the characters are doing stuff that just doesn’t make sense then it’s kind of hard.

Anyway…on to the good stuff…like I said, once I got past those first hundred or so pages, I found myself really hooked in the story! I was dying to know what was gonna happen! The cool thing about this book is that it didn’t give itself away…I couldn’t predict what was gonna happen and was surprised several times! Deception is the PERFECT name for this book, because you get the sense while reading that you can never be sure exactly who Emma should trust. Almost everyone is suspect at times, even her missing parents.

Deception has a great ending (one of my favorites of late actually) that leaves you wanting more and I definitely can’t wait for the next book in the series!