Major warning for ableism, minor warning for spoiling Follow Me Back.

*sighs*

When I read Follow Me Back, I actually thought it was a standalone. Imagine my surprise when it turns out to be the first book in a duology! Having enjoyed the book so mAuch, of course I'd go for Tell Me No Lies when I had the chance to read it.

I rather wish I hadn't now.

To give credit where it's due, Tell Me No Lies is exactly as readable as its predecessor and difficult to put down. Every chapter brings some new information, big or small, to light and demands you keep reading. Lately, it's been very easy for me to put down a book and do something else instead, but this is one book that wouldn't let me. Once Tessa and Eric get caught by Eric's awful manager and brought back to Hollywood, Eric and Tessa both become paranoid messes.

Oh, and Blair is out and about, of course. Still very obsessed with Tessa too. Romantically obsessed stalker characters get me every time!

The first sign of what troubles this novel comes from how Tessa and Eric get found in the first place: they go to a villa expecting to meet Dorian Cromwell, a pop star who also faked his death. During a press conference amidst his arraignment for tax evasion, Dorian reaches out to Eric and, when the opportunity presents itself via Snapchat, Eric replies. Our darling couple then proceeds to the villa where Dorian says he'll meet them.

But remember, Dorian just got arrested for tax evasion after his faked his own death. Are the authorities in Europe really going to release him and let him go off to Central America for such a meeting? Of course not! The guy is a flight risk! If Tessa and Eric had taken just a second to think things through, they would have known something was up. Alas, the narrative required they hold the Idiot Ball and walk right into an obvious trap.

That isn't the only time readers will see right through the book either. Tell Me No Lies is full of such transparent, eyeroll-worthy twists.

Then comes the ableism. See, Tessa never refilled her Ativan (also known as lorazepam) before she went on the run with Eric and it's a given that she never did it while hiding with her beau in Mexico either. After the two go to Hollywood and Eric's management cooks up the story that she was hired to pull off the publicity stunt of his "murder," she doesn't get it refilled then either. All that leads to her taking her medication very sporadically throughout the book.

BIG NO-NO THERE FOR MEDS MEANT TO BE TAKEN DAILY. Being that I've been prescribed Paxil as a daily anxiety medication and was formerly prescribed additional Xanax for emergency situations, I know a bit about this. Taking my Paxil as sporadically as Tessa takes her Ativan would give me flu-like symptoms at best and make Paxil less effective in treating my generalized anxiety disorder at worst. The Xanax was approved for me to take sporadically, but I almost never did. Even tiny doses of it knocked me off my feet and sudden anxiety attacks simply didn't happen.

Anyway. Tessa is already on edge in part due to her taking her meds so little, but after she and Eric finally have sex, she stops taking her Ativan altogether. From there, she spirals downwards into being a seriously paranoid unreliable narrator. Why? Because it's so impossible to keep someone on their psychiatric meds and make them an unreliable narrator!

Except that's an accurate description of my mother, who has been on meds for depression for 20+ years and is a highly unreliable narrator.

None of this is on Tessa, whose reasons for taking her meds so haphazardly and then not at all are entirely believable. Plus she's a fictional character. I'm placing the blame on the narrative because it's for the entertainment of largely neurotypical narrators that a mentally ill girl like Tessa is taken off her meds in order to advance and complicate the story.

This happens all the time in any media which stars a mentally ill character. No one can think of any other way to tell stories about us! We're almost never the Chosen One or the hero, entertaining with our journey toward saving the world. Characters like us entertain by suffering until we either die or are granted live-saving medication at the very end of the book.

Even though Tessa gets back on her meds by the end and the message is to stay on them if you have them, the novel relies on her mental health meltdown to entertain readers and give the story more of a thrill by making her point of view untrustworthy. This is ableism toward the mentally ill. Full stop. Find better ways to write us or don't write us at all. All of us, diagnosed or not, deserve better.

Like I said on Twitter,

Keep mentally ill YA characters on their meds 2K18

Stop taking mentally ill characters off their meds to make stuff happen or make them an unreliable narrator 2K18.

If you read and enjoyed Follow Me Back like I did, just pretend it's a standalone. Pretend Tessa did in fact murder Eric and disappear. That's a much better conclusion than what Tell Me No Lies offers you with its ableism, unbelievable miscommunications, and bad twists.

Love, love, LOVE it! I read it in less than a day. It grabbed me and kept me. I can't wait to get this for my HS Library! I didn't read "Follow Me Back," so I had no preconceived notions and no background and STILL loved it! It's modern and realistic; its characters are hopeful and immature and believable. The only character not fully developed is the one created as the diversion to the deception (the costume designer). I loved being twisted and confused and guessing. Well done, A.V.!

This was an interesting follow-up to Follow Me Back. I definitely enjoyed the first one more, This one had a lot of information crammed in a short amount of pages. I do like the fact that Eric and Tessa got what they wanted in the end. And it's a cute love story... but Tessa's disorders and illnesses seemed to go uncured or at least there's nothing indicating that anything is to be done about them. I did like this.. and I was definitely shocked in the ending. It was very unexpected. A lot of it was jumbled and a little unorganized. A good duology though for sure. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to read this!

I must say that I have really mixed feelings about this book. I read Follow Me Back last year, back when it was released in France, and I was really excited to read the sequel already. I was really curious to see what it was about, and even more so after I read the synopsis. However, I was rather disappointed by Tell Me No Lies.

The book picks up a few months after the end of the previous one, and follows the same kind of format as Follow Me Back: chapters following the POV of Tessa, Eric & Blair, and the transcription of police interviews.
These transcriptions were the one reason that kept me reading during the most part of the book. I found the first half rather boring, I didn't feel any connection to the characters anymore, and overall I was expecting more (mostly because the synopsis was so intriguing).

Things finally start to become interesting during the second half, and I find myself more involved in it. Things happened rather fast but that didn't bother me, on the contrary. The pace and the plot-twists got me just as addicted to the book as I had been last year with the sequel. There were still some things that were really predictable, but I was really surprised by some events that went down in the book.

After loving Follow Me Back so much, I had such high expectations, I'm a bit sad it didn't reach them. It is a good book, but not an amazing one, and definitely not one as good as the first.

When I finished Follow Me Back last year I was stunned and shocked, such a cliff hanger and have been drooling since, only to find out the sequel won't be out until June 5th. Ugh. How unfair.

However, I was extremely lucky enough to get an advanced copy of this second book Tell Me No Lies by Net Gallery and Amazon Digital Services and I sunk my teeth right in.

This is pretty good (not as good I felt as the first, but I was on the edge of my seat with the second) and jumped right into where it left off in Follow Me Back. It held my attention as I really wanted to know the main plot ending of Who did it? This does have twists that you don't see coming and will shock you. This is a well written book and a fast read. I absolutely love the romance between Tessa and Eric (ah young love). Why they would continue with social media, I have no idea as this is the heart of all their problems. To be a celebrity too, not good. This book is suspenseful, well written with great characters, shocking, head shaking, crazy, and be careful who you trust.

The ending left me feeling blah, is there going to be a Volume 3? I would like to know what happened to all the characters.

Thank you Net Gallery and Amazon Digital Services for the advanced copy and of course the Author A.V. Geiger.


Cherie'


#netgallery #amazondigitalservices #followmeback #avgeiger

Mediocre at best, this story is about a young woman battling anxiety and her relationship with a pop star on the run from his record label. Its cliched and predictable, but makes for a quick read.

This was intense! A.V. Geiger knows how to write a thrilling page-turner. I look forward to her future works.

That said, however, I think my favorite of this duology is Follow Me Back.

I don't know exactly what it is but I feel like this book is missing something that the first book had. There were two particular things that didn't quite work for me which I can't mention because spoilers.

All in all, definitely don't miss this sequel if you loved Follow Me Back.

Love. Obsession. Jealousy. Murder.

No one knows what happened to pop icon Eric Thorn. His Twitter account has been inactive since his cryptic tweet a month ago. His cell phone was found cracked, bloody, buried in the snow.

Agoraphobic fangirl Tessa Hart knows the truth, but she’s finally left her #EricThornObsessed days behind. She has no intention of ever touching her Twitter app again, especially not after being stalked (partly involving Twitter) months before. But Snapchat…that’s safer, right?

After months of living under the radar, Tessa emerges from hiding, forced to face the deadly consequences of her past. But in the interrogation room, answers only lead to more questions in the pulse-pounding conclusion to the Follow Me Back duology.

Tell Me No Lies picks up shortly after the point that Follow Me Back left off. If you haven’t read Follow Me Back, and want to read this one, you’ll definitely need to read the first book first – it wont stand on its own without the context from the first book! The first book left off on a cliffhanger, so I could not WAIT to get my hands on Tell Me No Lies, so of course I started reading it immediately after being approved for it on Netgalley!

I don’t want to give away too much about the book because of the cliffhanger the first book left off on, so this review will be on the vague side and will be a little tricky to write! Instead of talking too much about the story, I’ll talk about how I felt about it in order to avoid any spoilers!

The first book was told largely though Twitter DMs and conversations, which I really enjoyed. This one has less of that, but is broken up by past events and the present, which are police interview transcripts, so there’s still a little bit of that type of storytelling. There are also some tweets and snapchat conversations throughout the story as well, which continued the theme nicely of being told in an alternative format that we saw in the first book!

I’ll admit that once the book opened and some of my initial questions were answered, I was a little worried the book would be flat and less exciting and dramatic than the first book, and I’m so happy to report that I was completely wrong! The second installment in the series was just as heart-pounding as the first, and has just as much (if not more!) action and tension, and I completely ate it up! There were times that I dropped the book in shock with my mouth hanging open, because some of the reveals were just that good!

All in all, this was an excellent YA thriller, and a great conclusion to the Follow Me Back duology! If you loved the first book, you’ll definitely want to pick this one up! I rated it 4.5 stars. I’d like to thank Netgalley, Sourcebooks Fire, and A.V. Geiger for my copy of the book. It was my pleasure to provide an honest review. Tell Me No Lies is out on June 5, 2018, so be sure to pre-order your copy!

This is the conclusion to Follow Me Back. To be honest I don't remember a whole lot about that book, only that I had fun reading it and it shed some light on the dangers of social media. The same can be said about this book. Instead of focusing only on Twitter like the first book, we learn about Snapchat (okay, maybe I'm the only one who learned about it) and even though it may seem safer, you just never know what can happen. I was a little surprised at who the culprit was in this one. I enjoyed a look into Eric Thorn's life, how demanding and hectic it is to be famous. I'm a sucker for books that have police interviews and Twitter messages and stuff like that so I loved those parts. Overall this was a fast read and a satisfying end for me.

“Follow Me Back” was a four star read for me- I enjoyed the explorations of what male sexual objectification feels like, and teasing out the mystery of the trauma that incited Tessa’s agoraphobia. I also enjoyed the unsettling cliffhanger of ending.

When “Tell Me No Lies” picks back up we soon learn the fate of Tessa and Eric, while also introducing us to a new mystery. Tessa’s back in the police interrogation room and we’re not sure why.

It’s hard to share much about the book without revealing some of the surprises along the way.
I appreciated that once again the audience was asked to examine the pitfalls of fame and the potential dangers the way social media can be manipulated. I also appreciated that once again mental health could be explored in a frank and honest way.

I didn’t connect with the characters as much this time around because we were primarily treading established territory for the first half of the book. And while I enjoyed the reveal of the villain in this story, they had a minion whose main reason for existing seemed to be to help prompt the villain into the good ol’ “why I did it” monologue.

Overall, it was good to find out what happened to all the major players from the first book, explore what people think they are entitled to, and get a sense of closure once the book ended.

I'll be honest - I wasn't happy with this book's prequel, because it left everything hanging. So...it's not surprising that I like this book much better, since it answers the questions I had at the end of the last book.

I don't want to say too much about the plot, since I don't want to spoil anything; however, I think the character development was excellent, and the plot was exciting!

Holy crap, I just don’t even know what to say right now. Tell Me No Lies was such a wild ride! It’s very unputdownable and once I started, I just had to finish!
.
Tell Me No Lies picked up right where Follow Me Back left off which means you’re thrown right into the action! It also means that you can just read the first chapter because the next thing you know it’s several hours later and you’re done. Or at least that’s what happened to me haha!
.
There’s not much I can say without giving things away so let’s just say HOLY SHIT I didn’t see that twist coming! Seriously, WTF? You really got me, Geiger.
.
Follow Me Back and Tell Me No Lies are both so addicting!! If you haven’t read Follow Me Back then you need to get on that ASAP!

Rating: 4.5/5

When I read Follow Me Back last year, it was at a time where my book reading and ARCs were a bit lacking. Follow Me Back was a light breath of fresh air, and I devoured it quickly. I even came to realize I super love the trope of celebrity/super star falling in love with a normal person!

And then the cliffhanger came, and I was crushed. Heartbroken! How could this cliffhanger come out of the blue?!

Well, I am so glad it did. Tell Me No Lies did not disappoint me in the slightest. The question of who died, and how could it have happened, and what MORE could happen? It was absolutely worth the wait for me. I was at about 70% this morning when I had to get off the subway, my heart racing as (spoiler inserted into goodread's review).

The book does focus on a new aspect of social media, one that makes more sense to the age of the characters. Snapchat and Instagram is where so many people are - though I never felt the Twitter relationship was unrealistic. Given Snapchat's conversations disappear, I understand why it couldn't be used too much in the story, though Instagram's chat function would have served better than the returns to Twitter. Pretty much my only complaint.

These books are fun and quick reads, and I enjoyed both books for exactly what they are..

It was nice to revisit the characters of pop star Eric Thorn and his biggest fan/girlfriend Tessa in this novel that picks up right where the first story left off. Without giving away any spoilers, the story is told in similar fashion to the first novel, with both text and transcripts from police reviews. The story reads quickly, is focused on social media (snapchat and twitter) and also deals with the safety of social media. There has been a murder and in this story told both in the present in through flashbacks, the reader is able to piece together the mystery that involves both Tessa and pop star gone missing, Eric Thorn. Thank you netgalley for this arc. I enjoyed this book and think it makes a good statement about the way that we use social media in our society today.