Ginny Myers Sain lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and has spent the past twenty years working closely with teens as a director and acting instructor in a program designed for high school students seriously intent on pursing a career in the professional theater. Having grown up in deeply rural America, she is interested in telling stories about resilient kids who come of age in remote settings. Dark and Shallow Lies is her debut novel. Follow her on Twitter @stageandpage and on Instagram @ginnymyerssain, or find her on her website at ginnymyerssain.com.
A teen girl disappears from her small town deep in the bayou, where magic festers beneath the surface of the swamp like water rot, in this chilling debut supernatural thriller for fans of Natasha Preston, Karen McManus, and Rory Power. La Cachette, Louisiana, is the worst place to be if you have something to hide. This tiny town, where seventeen-year-old Grey spends her summers, is the self-proclaimed Psychic Capital of the World—and the place where Elora Pellerin, Grey's best friend, disappeared six months earlier. Grey can't believe that Elora vanished into thin air any more than she can believe that nobody in a town full of psychics knows what happened. But as she digs into the night that Elora went missing, she begins to realize that everybody in town is hiding something—her grandmother Honey; her childhood crush Hart; and even her late mother, whose secrets continue to call Grey from beyond the grave. When a mysterious stranger emerges from the bayou—a stormy-eyed boy with links to Elora and the town's bloody history—Grey realizes that La Cachette's past is far more present and dangerous than she'd ever understood. Suddenly, she doesn't know who she can trust. In a town where secrets lurk just below the surface, and where a murderer is on the loose, nobody can be presumed innocent—and La Cachette's dark and shallow lies may just rip the town apart.
I was pleasantly surprised by Dark and Shallow Lies! I wasn't entirely sure what to expect—YA mystery is just not a genre I usually read—but I got a lot of similar vibes from this novel as I got from One of Us is Lying. There's a cast of young adult characters, all around seventeen years old, and all of them are suspects in this disappearance of one of their best friends. The main character, Grey, who only spends three months of the year in the town where her best friend Elora went missing, receives psychic visions of what happened to Elora, and is piecing together the mystery as a hurricane circles nearer and nearer to their town. Dark and Shallow Lies is appropriately dark, suspicious, magical, and haunting.
I really enjoyed the strong voice of the narration, by Grey, but also the strong voices of each of the other side characters. This is achieved via "written accents," where words are spelled how one would hear the Louisianan accent, and by Grey describing the world exactly as she, a psychic teenager, sees it. I thought it was very well done. My copy of the book smells strongly of flower perfume, and that combined with the language of bayou made for a transportive reading experience. I really felt like I was in Louisiana with these characters as they worked their way through the mystery.
I also enjoyed the structure of the novel. Each chapter begins with a flash that Grey receives from Elora in her last few minutes of life (we presume). I enjoyed reading those, because it gave me as the reader autonomy to also try to figure out the mystery of that night. I especially liked the revelation at the end (well, multiple revelations) on what the different parts each of the characters played. Every time I got close to guessing, I would find out that I was correct, but only a little bit correct. Myers Sain kept finding ways to sidestep the predictable, which I thought was incredibly well done, and made this a very engaging and mysterious read.
I do hope Ginny Myers Sain continues to write, as any books forthcoming by her will certainly be on my radar!
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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