Cecilia "CeCe" Brooks thought she had a close relationship
with her mother. When her mother commits suicide and rumors
of a sex scandal with a student erupt, CeCe is full of
uncertainty and pain. It doesn't help that her classmates
bully her about it and her father can't even look at her.
All she wants is to get through her last year of high school
under the radar, but when she has to volunteer at the very
crisis hotline her mother worked at, clues start to appear
that suggest her mother's death wasn't by her own hands.
THE DARKEST LIE is an intense, layered mystery that add up
to a complicated and exciting puzzle. Something about her
mother's suicide and supposed relationship with a student
doesn't sit right with CeCe, but her grief makes it hard to
search for what else might have happened. CeCe's voice is
strong, and you can feel her heartache and her desperate
desire to find the truth. The weight of her pain and the
rough bullying she faces make her want to hide, but she has
a strong backbone, and readers will cheer her on as she
finds pieces of her mother's mystery.
Parent-child relationships are an important theme in the
story, expanding far beyond just that of CeCe's and her
mother. Grief has made her father impossible to talk to,
which leads her to being more open to help Sam, a fellow
student and a newspaper intern, investigate. Sam has his own
convoluted relationship with his parents, which contrasts
nicely to CeCe's. The romance CeCe encounters adds some very
sweet and swoony scenes to the story, though there's no
telling who can or should be trusted until the end.
Pintip Dunn delivers another exciting novel with THE DARKEST
LIE. The high emotional stakes, complex mystery, and
explorations on family and grief make this a story you won't
want to put down.
In Pintip Dunn’s gripping and timely novel, a young woman
whose life unravels in the wake of her mother’s alleged
suicide sets out to clear her name.
“The mother I knew would never do those things. But maybe I
never knew her after all.”
Clothes, jokes, coded messages…Cecilia Brooks and her mom
shared everything. At least, CeCe thought they did. Six
months ago, her mom killed herself after accusations of
having sex with a student, and CeCe’s been the subject of
whispers and taunts ever since. Now, at the start of her
high school senior year, between dealing with her grieving,
distracted father, and the social nightmare that has become
her life, CeCe just wants to fly under the radar. Instead,
she’s volunteering at the school’s crisis hotline—the same
place her mother worked.
As she counsels troubled strangers, CeCe’s lingering
suspicions about her mom’s death resurface. With the help of
Sam, a new student and newspaper intern, she starts to piece
together fragmented clues that point to a twisted secret at
the heart of her community. Soon, finding the truth isn’t
just a matter of restoring her mother’s reputation, it’s
about saving lives—including CeCe’s own…