Monday, February 3, 2025

An Academy for Liars review


 Book: An Academy for Liars

Author: Alexis Henderson

Pages: 450

Date(s) Read: January 3rd, 2025 to February 3rd, 2025

Date Published: September 17th, 2024

Rating: 3/5

Genre:  Dark Academia

Characters: 4/5

Writing style: 5/5

Story: 3/5

Ending:  4/5

Cover: 3/5

Format: Soft Cover

Date Bought: N/A

Book Cost: 0.00


Favorite Quotes:

“He will never love you the way you want to be loved. And if you stay, he will love you even less, until one day you mean nothing to him.”

 

 

Review:

I was excited when I discovered that I had won a goodreads contest for a book I planned on buying. I'll be honest, after finishing this tome of a novel I'm glad I didn't have to pay for it. An Academy of Liars is a well-written mess of a book. This was a very peculiar and at times vexing book. Sometimes this book was riveting and engaging but more often than not the book was disconcerting and obtuse. Really the ending and the writing style are the saving grace. If this book was written by any other author this would have likely been a DNF.

 

Lennon Carter is a down-on-her-luck young twenty-something. Her fiancée is cheating on her, she has a lot of mental health problems and absolutely no direction. One night she gets a mysterious call, from a phone booth, telling her she's been accepted to the mysterious Drayton Academy. When she gets there for the entrance exam she's quickly whisked away into what seems like a whole other world. At Drayton Lennon learns how to do almost anything with the power of persuasion. It's an interesting and unique premise.

 

The magic/power system and world don't seem to ever quite have concrete grounding and you never feel sure you really have a grasp on the story, system, and world. I would have liked the fundamentals laid out more clearly, and a solid stable foundation for how exactly the power and world works. The characters, especially Lennon feel like they fall short too. Lennon never seems to take charge of her own life or have much direction on her own. She has always depended on the other men in her life for that and that never really changes though it's brought up. Other characters are a little more interesting but you don't get much insight into how they think or feel.

 

All in all, An Academy for Liars is not a bad book but it has major problems that really hold it back from being a great work of fiction. I think the writer should have spent a bit more time on this one. If you're looking for something odd and unique, it will definitely scratch that itch but at 450 pages it's quite the commitment.

 


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