THE LYING SEASON

A high school girl agonizes over the consequences of a mistake that she and her friends made in Christie’s YA series entry.

Seventeen-year-old Piper Rose, a senior at Millington Valley High School in Pennsylvania, is a talented ballet dancer with a promising future. She’s also the manager for the school’s soccer team, which counts her two brothers, Noah and Cooper, as members. They’re under enormous pressure from Coach Christopher O’Connell and many other town residents to finally beat their rival, Concord; success would mean athletics scholarships like the one that Ethan Horn, the older brother of the Roses’ teammate Jacob, won. The Horn and Rose families are connected through friendship and business, but that connection is complicated by Piper’s crush on Ethan and Jacob’s crush on her. She jumps at a chance to attend Noah’s 18th birthday drinking/hunting party at a quarry, even though she has to serve as designated driver, as it might finally give her a chance to tell Ethan how she feels. But a terrible accident and a subsequent coverup throw all their lives into turmoil; Piper even starts committing acts of self-harm. Can they—and should they—avoid a final reckoning? In her second Millington Valley novel, Christie offers a setup that’s somewhat reminiscent of Lois Duncan’s classic I Know What You Did Last Summer (1973), minus some of the thriller aspects. This allows the story to focus on Piper’s monthslong struggle with her conscience, which the author describes in an authentic voice; the teen’s feelings of loyalty and her fears for the future come to the fore, while she also deals with romantic difficulties, her former best friend’s jealousy, and other issues. Other characters’ personalities are also well rounded and enhance the book as a whole. Readers who lack an interest in sports may not feel engaged by the soccer drama, and the characters’ back-and-forth decisions on whether to confess also eventually become repetitive. For the most part, though, the tale makes for compelling reading.

A thought-provoking examination of how character can be tested.