Elizabeth Agyemang’s debut YA novel, Heart-Shaped Lies, adds a few twists to a familiar story. Three very different girls discover that behind his popular YouTube prank-star persona, their dream-boy, Tommy, is rotten to the core. Classic “John Tucker Must Die” revenge story, right? Not quite. When Tommy is actually found dead after his cheating and disturbing class prank are revealed, the girls believe they are suspects and work together to clear their names.

The publisher’s blurb refers to this story as a “tongue-in-cheek” mystery, but don’t expect humor. The first half of the book has solid character development, it explores these young women’s unique obsessions with public image and how Tommy uses that to manipulate them. The power he has over them creates a real tension in the story. Unfortunately, that tension is broken when Tommy’s death and the damaging content on his phone irreparably harms the girl’s public personas. What’s left is a finger-pointing whodunit with a Scooby-Doo style murderer reveal. It is possible that it was the author’s intention to satirize the popular teen-girls-solving-murders trend in YA literature by having these obviously innocent characters implicate themselves by interfering with a police investigation, but their choices often felt out of character and their omissions about the night of the murder unnecessarily stretch out the story.

There is an uncomfortable balance in the tone of Heart-Shaped Lies. In some ways it is a very realistic story that could educate young women about common red-flags in abusive relationships. But Tommy’s cartoonishly villainous behavior, it being set in a fictional Disney World, and reveal of the real killer make the plot unbelievable. Is this a revenge story? No. Is it a mystery? Kind of. Is this an empowering story for girls? Maybe?

Though it is only Tommy engaging in most of this behavior, be aware that there is physical abuse, emotional abuse, alcohol use, drug use, and mentions of sexually-explicit images throughout the novel. Ultimately, this isn’t a must buy, but Agyemang might have a promising future in YA.

Reviewed by Ivy Burns, Merrill Memorial Library, Yarmouth