Glad I got this book as an ARC, as I really wanted to read it but once I started I found it hard going. the first half of the book was slow so slow then suddenly it was like some one else had written it as the rest of the book was amazing and had everything I wanted from it. Just a shame you had to deal with the first half

I received an e-arc via netgalley however this book was a DNF for me. It also seems as though this book is on hold for publishing. Thanks again to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy.

I read this for a book tour and I don't think it was published in the end. Is there a way this can be confirmed?

This book is a sapphic mix of Grease and Mean Girls and it’s pretty freakin’ fun!

After stealing and crashing her step dads car, Ren is sent away to Louisiana (from Texas) for the summer to fix up houses effected by Hurricane Katrina. Ren is a lesbian with a unique personal style she’s comfortable with (half her head is shaved). The family she’s staying with has a niece, Britt, also staying there who is beautiful, blonde and stuck up, or so Ren thinks.

One day when they’re working on a house together, Britt passes out and Ren runs to get her uncle. After that the girls begin to open up to each other and become friends, though they can both be a bit hot and cold at times. Ren learns that Britt has syncope which causes passing out due to low blood sugar.

Ren begins to develop feelings for Britt that she soon realizes are reciprocated and there’s a sweet summer romance but it’s brought to an abrupt end. Then Ren moves towns and schools once returning to Texas and she learns the HBIC of her new prep school is none other than Britt, who has a boyfriend (who has been alluded to earlier in the story).

The story continues from there and it’s a really great story of a first young, queer relationship with all of the confusion and complexities. I don’t love infidelity in books but for this particular story I’m not holding it against it because of the very complex emotions and repression of (especially young) queer exploration.

The one part I didn’t care for was when Ren (while honestly concerned) asked Britt if she’s annorexic and Britt grabs a small stomach roll to show she isn’t. This perpetuates the belief that only very thin individuals can be annorexic, when this is factually inaccurate, any size human can have or develop this eating disorder.

Overall, this was a darling YA WLW story that I think is important for young queer girls to have available!

4 stars

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thank You to NetGalley and Victory Editing for the E-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Ren thought this was going to be the WORST SUMMER EVER. She crashed her step-father's car, leaving her BFF in a full leg cast, and in the process, got shipped off to a "home for wayward girls" deep in Louisiana. It can't get any worse, can it? But then we meet Brit. And her entire summer flips on its head. Two girls loving each other should be easy, right? Not in the deep South, where expectations are of a different kind.

I thought this was a really cute read and enjoyed it a lot. The characters were well-written and the story kept me hooked. I also LOVED the cover art. I'm definitely excited to read more from Jessa Russo.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

This book was a bit all over the place, ngl. Brit and Ren are supposed to be teenagers and exact opposites but they switch roles quite a lot and sometimes it was hard to believe they were just 17. I mean, how man 17-year-olds make references to 80's horror movies?

There were definitely parts I enjoyed and parts that made me go "hmm really?!" so it's hard to review this title. It's more a see for yourself kind of book as it depends on what you are looking for.

Some parts did fall sort of flat for me though as a lot of cliches were thrown in there for I don't know what reason, shock effect? Predictability? It took me out of the story quite a few times. There were also some loose ends or details that did not really contribute to the story like details about side characters who we then hardly hear of anymore.

Wasn't bad but this is not a book I would re-read.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Renata "Ren" Carpenter is sent off for the summer after getting into a car accident with her step-dad's car. She goes to live with Dev and his family and meets his niece Brit who she finds rude and attractive at the same time. They go from enemies to something more quickly, but Brit has to leave sooner than they both expect which causes heartbreak.

<spoiler> I was intrigued by the premise of the book. The first half of the book for the most part was enjoyable for the most part, but it would be improved with a bit of editing. The girls verbally spar at the beginning, but it would be better if there was a real cause to their antagonism. I did like the parts when they act soft around one another. My favorite moment was when Brit spends the day showing Ren around her favorite places in New Orleans. After falling for each other, they both crushed to learn that Brit has to leave after just a few weeks knowing each other.

The second act was what fell short for me. When they coincidentally reunite at the same high school, Ren is dismayed to find out that Brit is the queen bee head cheerleader with a football player boyfriend. I felt Brit lacked agency which weakened the ending even though I want the girls to be together. I feel if both leads had more character development, the ending would feel more deserved.

When Brit was too scared to come out and asks Ren if they can continue seeing each other, I understood her fear. When she is unwillingly outed by her boyfriend that she breaks up with him to be with Ren, I felt something was missing because Brit lacked agency in her coming out. There should be more time for Brit to show her confidence in accepting who she is. Changing the coming out scene or adding more chapters in the aftermath might help. Also the bullying Ren faced with paint was pretty terrible and I wondered why no adult intervened afterwards. In my opinion, the latter half of the book needs more editing.

Another issue that could be improved is how Ren views Brit. Since Brit has competed in beauty pageants, she dresses herself with that influence. Ren is a bit too over-critical about Brit's clothing while still lusting after her. I think there has to more build-up (not just them being attracted to each other) for their relationship to feel more real. </spoiler>

Overall, Girls Who Lie Together has promise, but would really do better with some revision. 3/5

Firstly thank you so much to Netgalley and Jessa Russo for an ARC of this book.
Girls Who Lie Together is a LGBTQIA YA enemies to lovers novel, I’d say aimed at pre-teen to early teens.
It was so easy reading I finished it in a few hours. I must admit I didn’t properly read the blurb so some things - like when Ren and Brit ended up in the same school - came as a surprise to me. Some things were slightly predictable but the books as a whole was reasonably enjoyable. Russo’s writing style made it s easy to tear through the book.
The characters were ok and some of the topics were relatable. I empathised with Brit and the person she felt she had to be to please those around her but found her character slightly frustrating. I loved Sterling’s character despite not getting much on her but the other characters didn’t make me overly interested. Some things were heavily stereotyped which made the book seem not so original and most of the characters had very little depth. I wasn’t particularly taken to Ren who seemed a bit judgemental and kept commenting of Brit’s body.
The whole summer love idea reminded me of Robin Talley’s Our Own Private Universe.

Girls who lie together by Jessa Russo is a YA, LGBTQIA Romance novel. It’s about Renata ‘Ren’ who totalled her stepdads car, injuring herself and her friend who was put in a cast. She ends up getting sent to New Orleans to do a work program. She never expected to fall in love; especially not with Brit.

I feel like this book has a lot of potential especially for the right crowd, however it just wasn’t for me and I ended up DNFing it. It was very faced paced and straight forward but felt like the writing was too much like a teen wrote it or like a fan fiction. Other than the fact that there is a lot of language I would recommend it to younger teens.

I found that the book was quite repetitive in how I could always predict what would happen because the same thing would have just happened in the previous chapter.

As for the characters, Brit was….quite something. She was lowkey annoying but then again I think she was going through some heavy stuff. Ron wasn’t that bad, she was just very full of herself and she desperately needed to get over that. My favourite character was for sure Dev and Lucy though, the real MVPs.

I feel really bad because I feel like all I’m doing is bashing this book but I really do think it has potential for the right target audience

I hope everyone who decides to read this enjoys it :D

#girlswholietogether #NetGalley #ARC #advancedreaderscopy #jessarusso

Girls Who Lie Together is fun, flirty and has a protagonist that will leave you in stitches.

Easy to read, with a classic storyline with an added feel-good worked in.

A good read.

Thank you Victory Editing NetGalley Co-op and NetGalley for the ARC of this novel. The description of this as Grease meets Mean Girls definitely drew me in.

Ren was intriguing as a main character but I had a really hard time with Brit. She really was a mean girl and pretty terrible to a lot of people and you never get a good explanation as to why. You do not meet her stepfather, the mother when shown looks to be supportive and Brit just comes across as a terrible person. Brit's choices once we get into the Grease portion of meeting your summer fling at school to maintain her reputation became unconscionable I am happy that Ren got what she wanted but oh my goodness is Brit a bad person! Sterling and Gray were fun side characters but I have to drop my enjoyment on what was done to Ren and that she allowed it to happen. 3 stars.

This brought me out of my reading slump. Such a great read! I really loved the plot and I couldn't put this book down cause I just wanted to know what would happen next.
Thank you NetGalley for the ARC, such an honor reading this book

This book had so much promise- it really did! Enemies-to-lovers, pretentious private school, Mean Girls and Grease vibes... how bad could this story be? Unfortunately, it was bad.

To start with what I liked about the book: The first half of the book takes place on a farmhouse in New Orleans where our main character Renata Carpenter is sent to spend her summer as punishment for hijacking her stepdad's car and injuring her best friend. Here, she is put in a work program helping hurricane victims rebuild alongside her host family and their beautiful, pageant-worthy, yet judgmental and severely closeted niece - Brit. The book's second half switches to the beginning of that upcoming school year when Renata's family moves towns - and schools - leaving everything familiar to Ren behind. To make matters worse, her parents have enrolled her in a preppy private school, where none other than Brit is head "mis popular" alongside her stereotypical jock boyfriend. Again, the book's premise appears to have great potential, but that's where it fell flat.

To begin, the book relies on character stereotypes. Heavily. Sometimes this isn't a problem, while other times, it can be overkill. Brit is supposed to be your classic "closeted pageant queen fem lesbian with the homophobic boyfriend", and Renata is meant to be the "edgy and rebellious open lesbian that falls for the 'straight girl' and ultimately is the reason said girl realizes she's gay". Which leads to their relationship... or lack thereof. This is a prime example of insta-love because as soon as Ren comes in contact with Brit she's already falling for her perfection... and ultimately staring at her body every chance she gets. This then takes me to the next issue I had with this book: the strange and completely unnecessary sexualization.

Ren is constantly thinking about Brit's body and looking at her no matter what she's wearing - and associating whatever Brit wears with the thought "she's wearing it for me". Secondly- Ren's (guy) best friend consistently talks about Ren finding him "hot girls" and talking about them solely in - again - a sexual manner. For being the main character’s closest friend, I was expecting him to have more of a solid character with a personality (besides wanting girls), but alas, that is the most we got out of him.

But possibly my biggest problem with this book was the uncalled-for "bitch" calling. Every time Brit did something Ren didn't like, she'd call her a bitch. Multiple times. I understand that Ren was upset that Brit's actions towards her appeared bipolar, but keep in mind Brit was dealing with internalized homophobia and cared about her self-imagine tremendously, which explained her doings. For a book that was supposed to be about love and acceptance, this strange misogynistic behavior - especially from a queer woman, felt off.

This aside, the writing style alone made the story feel choppy and incomplete. To begin, there was an overuse of the same verbs and adjectives. There can only be so many times that one character can “wink” and “giggle” before you start rolling your eyes. Come to the ending of the book, it felt abrupt and unfinished in a way. There was a large buildup that ultimately fell through and ended on an abrupt and unsatisfying note from both Ren and Brit’s situations.

This book had the beginnings to become something worth reading, but the writing itself had too many errors that prevented me from fully enjoying it. I have hoped that this author could move towards a better direction in their writing as time goes on, but as for this book alone, it was a disappointment.

GIRLS WHO LIE TOGETHER follows Renata Carpenter as she falls in love with Britta Hughes. When Ren totals her stepdad’s car, her mother sends her away for the summer as punishment. While there, she stays with a family and their niece, Brit. It’s hate at first sight for the two of them, but they slowly finding themselves falling for one another, through sneaking kisses when the adults’ back where turned. But then Brit has to return home and they say goodbye to each other, expecting to never see each other again. However, Ren’s mother surprises her with the fact that they’re moving across the state, and that Ren is going to have to start her senior year at a new school. While there, she discovers that Brit goes there, and they rekindle the relationship they had during the summer.

I’m conflicted. My thoughts and feeling towards this book are mostly in one jumbled big mess, and I’m not quite sure how to articulate my thoughts correctly.

Let’s start with Ren. In my honest opinion, I’ve never really gotten the hatred the ‘not like other girls’ girls get, but I get it now. This was Ren, in a nutshell. She was not like other girls. Ren was a character grabbed out of any early 2010s YA book and plonked down into a 2022 YA Queer romance. What with her shaved head, which was mentioned numerous times, and her insistence on judging anything pink and sparkly, she felt like an incomplete gothic girl from the 2000s. She judged Brit as soon as she entered the room, and mentioned her boobs far too many times in the span of about three chapters. This made me mildly uncomfortable, because there was no need for it—and it definitely pulled me out of the story. I get Ren is a teenage girl, and a queer one at that, but she judged Brit for wearing a push up bra and constantly thought about how big her boobs were. It was fairly odd. She was superficial, not to mention annoyingly melodramatic when she got separated from the girl she’d only known for about three weeks. Maybe my ability to read high school romances as an eighteen year old university student is failing me, but wallowing in your sadness for almost six weeks after saying goodbye to someone you barely even knew is a tad bit stupid, and not at all something I could see any teenager my age doing—queer or not. When she goes to the new school, her attitude improves somewhat but not that much. She’s still fairly judgemental, and this doesn’t help with Sterling by her side. However, Ren wasn’t all bad. She stood up for herself and definitely didn’t change herself to meet other’s expectations or allow the likes of Carter to force her into being someone she’s not. She was sure of herself and I liked that about her, along with the banter she shared with her best friends and Brit.

Brit was somewhat annoying, more so after the mid point, but still annoying. She hated Ren immediately for absolutely no reason, which is textbook lazy writing when it comes to an enemies to lovers plot line. There was nothing between them that made them hating one another understandable. Their relationship developed fairly quickly and Brit became less annoying as the story progressed. But then as soon as we hit the middle and senior year begins, she becomes insufferable. Britta Hughes is their high school’s ‘Queen B’, and she’s even called that too. Her boyfriend is the typical homophobic jock who’s only really her boyfriend for show. It was painfully cliché and something I would expect to read in a 2015 Wattpad novel—and I mean that with the upmost respect towards those books and disrespect towards this one, as that era has passed. It was too much. Most YA books these days have some form of clique like this, but this just took it and ran with it, piling so much unnecessary shit on top of one another that I was wondering how this book was even published in the year 2022. The ‘Queen B’ rules the school and anyone who dares to go against her or her boyfriend are branded outcasts. The conversations between the characters felt juvenile and not at all how teenagers talk these days—and I should know. I am one. Brit was superficial, and had no backbone whatsoever. I understand not wanting to come out—she shouldn’t have to—but standing by while your boyfriend pours paint all over your kind-of-girlfriend and not saying a thing felt a bit off to me. Also, at the end, the whole thing with Homecoming was also strange, because why does she care that much about a crown? Is this just my British-ness coming out, and the fact that I didn’t get a prom in 2020 influencing my thoughts? Possibly. But once again, it felt very melodramatic and kind of like the author doesn’t understand how eighteen year olds think or act, or what our motivations are. Brit hated pageants and that sort of thing, so why does the crown matter to her so much?
I feel like the more reviews I do for Netgalley, the more critical my reading becomes. So maybe I’m just nitpicking, but this book felt very old for it not even being out yet.

There were a few instances that made me uncomfortable that I feel like come from the author, rather than the characters. I believe the author is white (please correct me if I’m wrong and I’ll delete this, but from all of the photos I’ve seen, she looks white), and it was mentioned once that Ren was a ‘brown skinned, shaved-head, car-jacking liberal lesbian’. Now, I don’t believe that sentence in of itself is problematic. I just feel like including more than halfway through the book that Ren is a woman of colour and never mentioning it again feels disingenuous to the story. It felt like a half-arsed attempt at adding in diversity, on top of her best friend being Asian.

Once again, I might just be nitpicking. This book was a fairly fun one, with decent scenes and stakes that kept me reading. But I feel like there were too many issues with the character’s personalities and because of that, I just didn’t feel as interested as I wanted to be.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with the arc of this book prior to release.

Ren, after stealing her stepfather's care, gets sent away to a work house for the summer.

Loved the cover, the summary was interesting, but the actual story and plot fell flat.

This book was a nice summery, easy lgbt read and it had a lot of potential. I think it’s a book that’s better if you look at it just at face value and don’t expect too much.

I liked the start of it more - when britt and ren are out in the country and we are learning about them as characters and developing their relationship, more than when they go back to school.

Having said that, the relationship between ren and britt didn’t feel real enough to me. Britt says repeatedly to ren she doesn’t like girls yet ren seems to acknowledge and ignore that in the same breath, still lusting after britt and convincing herself britt does like her back after all. Then they went from absolute loathing each other to the sparks when they touch and kissing, then back to loathing each other in a matter of pages, and I just couldn’t get my head around it?

I appreciate the TWs of the homophobic slurs as this was not comfortable to read - I appreciate its high school so there will be some people and instances where these words are used.

I didn’t find either of the characters particularly well developed and they did just feel like big stereotypes - ren was consistently a dick the whole way through, acknowledges this and yet still does it. Britt - the typical blonde mean girl. They seemed to change each other and bring out the best in each other at times which was nice but I’d have liked to have seen them develop as characters on their own too, not relying on someone else.

Overall if you want an easy to read lgbt book, this will tick that box. The easy story and writing style meant I flew threw the book in no time and I did enjoy it, I just feel like I was left wanting a bit more.

this book was really good! Overall i liked the characters and the storyline. I also really like the cover i think its so pretty and really cute for the summer

You Should See Me in a Crown meets Some Girls Do in this interesting story. Ren is sent off to a friend of her step-dad's as punishment for totaling a car. There, she meets Britta, and it's a case of opposites attract. Ren becomes borderline obsessed with Britt in the way teenagers do.

The writing gets repetitive and relies heavily on stereotypes, especially when it comes to Britt and the town she lives in. I do absolutely respect the way Ren handles Britt's secret.

Thank you for the opportunity to read and review this ARC!

Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me the opportunity to read an arc of "Girls Who Lie Together" by Jessa Russo, scheduled to release on August 2nd, 2022.

Overall, I rated this book 4/5 stars.

This book focused on our main character Ren, who gets into some trouble with her stepfather for taking his car on a joyride with her best friend Grayson, totaling it and landing him in the hospital with a broken leg. Her mother ends up sending her to go help rebuild a home in New Orleans for the summer. There, she meets Brit and falls head over heels for her, despite her not being her typical type.

I really enjoyed the outline of the novel, however, I did not like that Ren was written as such a pushover who gave in so easily. The character of Brit was written as a typical high school teenager, though.

Thank you to NetGalley for giving me an ARC copy.
Girls Who Lie Together is separated into two distinct halves. the first focusing on the protagonist, Renata/Ren attending a work program after she hijacks and damages her stepdad’s car. The second focusing on Ren attending a new school in a small Texan town. The plot was easy to follow, maybe a bit cliche at times but overall decent for a light young adult read.
The book had a strong supporting cast however some of the questionable actions of the lead characters left me with mixed feelings towards them. Ren and Brit's romance was cute, and the banter between the two was interesting.
Ren’s narration was enjoyable for most of the book, however, some of the use of slang felt a bit awkward and at times pulled my attention away from the book. Her constant comparisons of Brit to Barbie also felt a bit overdone.
Overall it was an enjoyable read, suited to a young adult audience or anyone who likes teen romance movies and books.