Review: "Live Your Best Lie" by Jessie Weaver

Live Your Best Lie by Jessie Weaver
Published January 2023 via Disney Books
★★★

There are two sides to every story, but the loudest voice, not the truest one, gets heard. Summer is pretty freaking loud. (222)

On paper, Summer has it all: a wealthy and well-connected family, loyal friends, and a wildly successful job as a social media influencer. Still a teenager, she has a book scheduled for release and plans to spring into bigger and better things.

But when Summer is found murdered at her own Halloween party, and the other teenagers in her circle are the top suspects, the cracks start to show. All of them have secrets—and the more they, and the police, dig in, the clearer it becomes that Summer knew those secrets...and she was prepared to set it all on fire and let everyone burn in her wake.

Definitely a fun romp of a YA mystery—I read it for the influencer drama (not my world, but for the time being, I love it in fiction), and it reminds me a bit of Killer Content, for obvious reasons. The mystery itself isn't anything particularly new or exciting, though (hurrah) I didn't guess the end until it was right on top of me, but the book is doing one thing that I almost never see: there are two side characters in the book who have disabilities (spina bifida and epilepsy), and that's just...part of their story. One of those things comes into play a bit in the backstory, but mostly it's just hello here are these characters this is one thing that informs who they are but here are a bunch of other things that inform who they are too. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is—YA is getting better about diversity when it comes to race and sexuality and, sometimes, body size, but casual acknowledgement of disability? Rarer than a still-bleeding steak. Very glad to see any small progress there.