Customer Reviews

Little Black Lies

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I am such a fan of YA and I was thrilled to be able to add this author to my list of must read authors.

Indeed, with Sara, our main character, author Cohen introduces us to a complex, basically good intetioned girl who has lived a difficult home life with the result that she now feels she must do anything and everything in order to protect herself and more importantly, be accepted by her new bunch of snobby school friends from her elite school. If this means lying - than so be it.

At first, I had a hard time understanding the motivation behind much of Sara's actions, but as we find out more and more about her, I found myself understanding more - if not agreeing with her actions. She is dealing with OCD - which he father suffers from and this alone would be hard enough, but she also has to contend with alot more personal stuff that is slowly revealed to us throughout the book.

I like that the author did not make Sara this perfect little girl - or this rich little girl or this total horrible person - which has kind of been done to death in novels lately. Sara is somewhere in the middle - trying to find her own way.

The writing is good and kept up at a good pace, although I must admit that the first chapter was a little slow - but soon moved on quickly. I also liked that the author made sure to add a little dose of romance for good measure.

Overall, a very good read.

LITTLE BLACK LIES begins with Sara Black, sixteen years old, beginning her first day at Anton High School. It's said that getting into Anton is tougher than getting into Harvard, but Sara gets in mainly because her father is the new janitor. Her father also suffers from OCD, which is why he lost his previous job.

Anton is way different than Sara's last school. There's more pressure and the students come from money. During first period when students were discussing their summer vacation, the class misunderstood when Sara said she moved here from Lundon, like in Massachusetts. They thought she meant London, like in Europe. When she didn't correct the mistake, this lie began a web of deceit. As Sara tiptoes across Anton's social minefield, it's hard to juggle her two personas without getting caught. And that's where she's heading, but not until she hurts the two people who mean more to her in the world - her father and her best friend, Mandy.

Although the plot leans towards the predicable side, the author's way of telling a story is unique and must be experienced to appreciate. Each of the characters are captured so vividly on paper. Also, readers will feel the story's emotions, especially those of Sara, her guilt and pain. It's not a terribly sad story, but one I felt all the way through.

When Sara Black's OCD father lands a job as a janitor at the elite Anton High, Sara, a junior, is given the opportunity to enroll in the school. Most students have to enroll freshman year. Anton High School is a change from the public high school life she was accustomed to. Most of Anton's students come from privileged lifestyles, so when Sara's classmates mistakenly believe she comes from London, England, instead of Lundon, Massachusetts, she goes along with it. She also does not tell her classmates that the janitor is her father or that her mother ran off with her old science teacher. Soon, however, some of Sara's classmates feel their popularity is threathened by Sara, and her black lies soon catch up to her...

The best thing about Little Black Lies was Cohen's ability to slowly reveal details about Sara's family life, which added up to the bigger picture. These details were scattered around the book, but each time they perfectly flowed with whatever was happening at the moment. I loved reading about how Sara's mother's affair affected her father. Cohen's portrayal of her father's OCD was realistic. I also enjoyed reading about Sara's relationship with her mother.

Sara's classmates were reminiscent of Mean Girls, with Carling being the Queen Bee. Nothing too original, but entertaining nonetheless. I also really liked Leo, Carling's boyfriend, who eventually became the love interest of Sara. Leo's past with Sara's lies were an interesting combination. I only had one major dislike about Little Black Lies. From the beginning, Sara realized her lies were wrong, yet she continued to consciously dig herself into a deeper hole, which completely frustrated me. Despite this, however, I still enjoyed the novel and wanted a sequel. This says a lot considering I am horrible when it comes to finishing series.

Fans of Mean Girls should be sure to look into Little Black Lies.

I must say this is probably one of the best realistic fiction books I've read lately. I loved the story - the little lies Sara kept telling to fit in - and how things turned out in the end.

This book has a list of great issues in it - divorce, OCD, starting over, and honesty.

I can't blame Sara for wanting to fit in at the new ritzy school she is attending. Why admit your dad is the OCD janitor, when you can pretend he's a brain surgeon?

Although set in a school that is filled with upper class kids, I felt this book was very realistic. The characters were flawed or concealing a secret. The problems these kids had were ones most of us have had to deal with. I definitely recommend reading this book.

Little Black Lies was a light read that a wide range of teens will enjoyable. It's a well written book that is 100% believable. That was one reason I enjoyed it so much, there was never a moment where you were thinking, "That'd never happen."

Each chapter opens with a random fact about ants, which comes from Anton students referring to themselves as "ants". I thought that was so unique! Tish Cohen created a main character you can sympathize for and also connect with, but I found myself frustrated at Sara at times. One lie would build into another, and she was a character that had nothing but great things for her. Though I do understand her struggle to balance school and family life. The other characters really grow on you as the novel goes on. There were a few characters I was not crazy about in the beginning, but were my favorites by the end.

I loved the underlying romance throughout the entire novel. I would have liked to see a little more of it, as I fell in love with the boy and would've liked to know a bit more about him. I liked the involvement of OCD with Sara's father. It really makes you understand how living with someone with ODC can affect your life. Little Black Lies ends with an ending to make you go "Awww"

Little Black Lies was a novel I really enjoyed reading, and should Tish Cohen decide to continue Sara and the other characters story, it'd be a book I'd be first in line to buy.

Little Black Lies was a wonderful read! It wasn't that hard to get into at all and by the time your halfway through with it, it's hard to put down! First off, I'd like to mention that one of the reasons I was drawn to this book because it takes places in Boston, one of my favorite places and it has to do with a private school -well, technically this school isn't one, but it might as well be. And Tish Cohen does this neat little thing with the chapters, she starts them all out with a quote about ants, which the students at Anton High calls themselves.

Sara Black never planned on lying, but soon one lie leads to another and pretty soon she's dug herself into a pretty deep hole that she's having a lot of trouble getting out of. What I liked about Sara is that even though she does get mixed up with some pretty snobby girls like CARLING, Isabella, and Sloane, she still had a good heart and at times I couldn't help but feel bad for her. I felt that the book was realistic and it was easy to see where she was coming from. In the end, there are consequences for everyone and I was glad to see Sara coming clean of all her lies.

I loved the relationship between Sara and her dad. I admired Sara's dad, Charlie, was always there for her (especially when her mother isn't.) I'm glad that this book talked a lot about what Charlie had go through with his OCD. I wasn't expecting Little Black Lies to talk about the seriousness of the disorder, but I'm glad it does! Another thing that I really, really liked about the book is that it actually talks about the hard work that students actually get. I relate to Sara so much when she spent a lot of her time studying to maintain her grades. But, unlike Sara, I am no mathwhiz! The ending of the book was really good. I liked the bit of relationship that Sara has, its a nice touch.

Little Black Lies
By Tish Cohen

Publisher: Egmont USA
# of pages: 320
Age Rating: +12
My Rating: 4 Stars
Where I got it: Won from a contest

Synopsis:
Sara Black is tiptoeing across a fraying tightrope.
As the new eleventh grader at Anton High - the most elite public school in the country - she sticks out like an old VW bus in a parking lot full of shiny BMWs. But being the new kid also brings a certain advantageous anonymity.
In Anton High's world of privilege, intelligence, and wealth, Sara can escape her family's tarnished past and become whomever she wants.
And what's the harm in telling a few little black lies when it can lead to popularity? That is, until another it girl at Anton becomes jealous of Sara's social climbing.
With her balance evaporating, one small push could bring Sara crashing down.

Review:
When I first got this book, I didn't know if I would like it or not, but I ended-up enjoying this book. It was very believable and realistic, everyone seem like real people.
And with Sara, you could sympathize with her, after all, her mom left her, her Dad, charlie's OCD is destroying him and she had to move to a new town and go to a new school. So there is alot of pressure of wanting to fit in so....What harm can one little black lie do? alot of harm.
I really like how the author made Sarah like a real girl, even when she has told alot of lies, she is not happy about it and she has a good heart. I also really like Sara relationship with her Dad, in alot of books, I don't see that at all.
I felt so sorry for poor Charlie, with his OCD that's hurting him. There wasn't alot of romance in here but the romance that they did have, it was cute. :D
The plot was very nice, it's kind of like those books that have school and popular girls that enjoy hurting other girl except that this book was clean, it's a book that I would give to younger girls to read.
I really enjoy this book and I think that you will enjoy it too.
I give it 4 stars.

Enjoy! :D:D:D

After hearing some mixed thoughts on this one, I wasn't really sure what to expect. Would I love it or hate it? Though, as it turns out, I ended up really enjoying Little Black Lies and I think you may also.

In Sara, Tish created a character that is complex and easy to relate to in the fact that she's dealing with fitting in along with peer pressure, the affects of her parents separation, the typical stress of school, and other teen problems. While I did like Sara, I had a bit of hard time accepting how she treated her father for most of the book. I mean I can understand that because of his OCD problem, she may have a hard time admitting/ dealing with it, but she could have done a lot of things differently then she did. Though, now that I think about this, maybe Tish is trying to show that while anyone can make mistakes, you have to make a bigger person out of yourself by learning from them which Sara had by the end. I also really enjoyed reading about Sara's neighbor, her best friend from back home, and the guy she liked whose names I can't remember currently.

The plot was also pretty great. Since it was basically a Gossip Girl like novel but instead of having drugs, sex, and swear words it switched all of them out with a far better thing: actual substance. One of my favorite parts was reading the little facts about Ants that related to Anton High students and seeing what it would be like going to a school as prestigious as Anton was. Also, it did have the tendency to throw in a random twist and turn at times that I also enjoyed.

Overall, Little Black Lies is yet another great novel by Egmont even with the few flaws it had, and I know for a fact that not only will I be reading more of Egmont novels, but Trish's too!

In YA novel Little Black Lies, Tish Cohen gives us antagonist Carling, a dangerously charismatic Queen Bee student, who protagonist Sara Black tries to befriend in a misguided attempt at shaking off her own reality. Author Tish Cohen gives motive without excuse to Carling's warped use of her perceived and real power. She fashions a page-turning morality tale for teenagers, where evil is (mostly) punished and (most) good deeds are eventually rewarded.

Cohen presents her well-crafted story of Sara's morality struggle through use of humor and gripping side plots (fathers with OCD, adulterous mothers, and a variety of other societal ills.) Books can help craft morality, but first they must hold interest, which Cohen does, as illustrated in this passage, where Sara calms her cleaning-obsessed father:

Knowing full well it's like giving the alcoholic a beer, I hand the bleach to my father. "Try this."

His wild eyes focus on me, but he says nothing. Just removes the cap, douses his cloth in fluid, and wipes the sink with it. He stands back and watches the sink go from shiny and silver with wetness back to mottled and dusty-looking silver. The sound of microbes screaming, dying, is nearly audible, and right away, I see his jaw slacken and relax."

Tish Cohen's books may be labeled young adult, but I find her work to be easily sophisticated enough for adult reading--certainly for those of us who are parents and may want to delve deeper into the minds of our youth. Cohen's understanding of those young minds is uncanny. I've been a fan since my introduction to Cohen about a year ago, reading Inside Out Girl, and in fact, was inspired to learn more and so interviewed her as feature author for The Smoking Poet at that time. Reading Little Black Lies, impossible to do slowly, I remember why.

Like that previous novel, this one, too, examines a broken and painfully dysfunctional family from the perspective of a teenager. Little Black Lies is the story of Sara Black in her freshman year at Anton High School, a school for the smart and the privileged. Sara is indeed very smart in terms of school work, but she is anything but privileged. She is able to attend the school mostly because her father is employed as janitor there, although her grades qualify her, too. As is so often true, however, book learning doesn't equal emotional intelligence or social skills, and Sara maneuvers her way through Anton, slangishly known as "Ant," by an ever deepening layer of lies. It's all about acceptance and fitting in. Something any honest teen will tell you: high school is a test of emotional and social intelligence far more than the measure of a sharp mind.

These are not white lies. I love Cohen's word play here, in title and in calling the school Ant, bringing up an image of insects slavishly following other insects, mindless and obedient to even the most irrational social rules. Sara's father, to whom on one hand she seems utterly devoted, while on the other hand whom she betrays completely, suffers from OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. Carrying wounds deep inside him that he has yet to resolve, Sara's father Charlie tries helplessly to clean away all that is dirt in his life: the betrayal of his wife (Sara's mother), who had an affair with a high school science teacher and left him and Sara, and other wounds going back to his own youth. The more stressed he becomes, the more he cleans and orders his life, attempting to bring order to chaos. Sara has learned to pick up on the symptoms, and her own attempts at soothing her father back into rational behavior become something of her own dysfunction, turning into almost pathological lying.

Of course, once you tell one lie, the lies multiply like rabbits, and the liar must work ever harder and harder to sustain the masking of truth. Every lie becomes uglier than the one before. Cohen resists any attempt to portray her characters as entirely black or white, but paints them in many shades of gray. Sara has many good attributes, exhibits many moments of goodness, and Cohen shows us the source of Sara's own wounds. Like every child, she longs for a stable home, loving parents, trustworthy and logical. Like so many children, she does not get that wish. Her mother chose her affair over her daughter, and her father, although truly a good man, has too loose a hold on his own sanity to fully be present for his young daughter. And so we come to understand and sympathize. To a point. As Sara's lies become ever blacker, there are also moments we lose all sympathy.

No one gets through life without telling some lies, but Sara repeatedly betrays her most faithful and true friend, Mandy, even when her friend is on the brink with her own troubles. Sara denies her father repeatedly, like a young Judas, pretending he is not her father when he smiles at her in school, standing by silently when the "in group" makes fun of him. Her motives are shallow, yet the same for too many teens. She craves acceptance from her peers and popularity with the boys. For this, no lie seems to be too big or too black. It seems she will do anything, anything at all, to keep that in crowd believing that she is a sophisticated and rich young woman whose roots are in London, England, rather than Lundon, Massachusetts. She concocts an elaborate history of fake parents with fake professions, even while her father passes her in the school halls, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning away the dirt that keeps coming back.

The book portrays an accurate portrait of the pressures at that age--pressure to be hyper-sexualized as a female and put out for popularity, not only by the opposite gender but almost especially from one's own; pressure to be rich with all the superficial attributes and accessories; pressure to be with the "right" friends, the pretty girls who wear high fashion labels and are more about the next party than any deeper value. Sara works hard to belong with her female peers, is much less concerned with the opposite sex in terms of acceptance, until Leo catches her eye. For this crush, she falls even deeper into lies, and becomes willing to risk her life rather than be found out.

A climactic scene unfolds when Charlie, her father, finally breaks down and spins out of control with his OCD. A human being can take only so much stress before the cracks finally begin to show. Sooner or later, one way or another, all lies surface. Sara watches in horror as her father loses it in school, this place that has become her theatre stage, and can't stop scrubbing invisible water stains from a school sink.


"That's not it!" I want to shout. He's not scrubbing to rid the sink of stains. He's got it in his head that this spot is wicked with danger. It doesn't matter that his opponent doesn't exist, it just matters that he feels he has won. That's the enigma of OCD.

At the doorway, more teachers have gathered and are herding the students down the hall. I slip past them into the laboratory.... The thought of paramedics racing in here and shooting Dad up with tranquilizers like some gorilla that's escaped from the zoo, only to strap him to a stretcher and whisk him off... is more than I can take... The kids are gone, along with many of the teachers. I pluck the bottle of bleach solution, Charlie's liquid solace, his pacifier, from the cleaning bucket... Knowing full well it's like giving the alcoholic a beer, I hand the bleach to my father. "Try this."

His wild eyes focus on me but he says nothing. Just removes the cap, douses his cloth in fluid, and wipes the sink with it. He stands back and watches the sink go from shiny and silver with wetness, back to mottled and dusty-looking silver. The sound of the microbes screaming, dying, is nearly audible, and right away I see his jaw slacken and relax.


Predictably, Sara gets found out. After her ever more extreme and desperate manipulations, the mask falls and reveals the vulnerable and hurting and deeply insecure girl inside. By the time that it does, some readers may have lost all ability to forgive. Wounded as she herself is, she has left a trail of victims: a good father denied, a loyal friend abandoned in her moment of greatest need, while stooping ever lower to be liked by popular girls who show no redemptive values whatsoever (only their own deeply hidden insecurities).

By end of book, it occurs to me that girls especially are today going to greater and greater lengths to please not boys, but other girls, trying to find love and acceptance that broken families have denied them. Teen females are dressing and behaving in a manner that makes it impossible not to objectify them--and Cohen does a great job of showing us what most parents are probably trying hard not to realize about their own children: our children are growing up in a promiscuous and dangerous world that cannot end well. They are seeking "love" in all the wrong places and from all the wrong people. All of which is a silent scream for help, yet another societal dysfunction, that adults must heed if we are to guide our youth into a healthy adulthood.

Important issues, and Cohen does not shy away from any of them. Like it or not, these are the realities of our contemporary world. Being young has never been more complicated, more obstacle-ridden, more testing, than it is today. And many teens are navigating this complicated and confused world on their own, their parents often too obsessed with careers or their own affairs to notice. With this, Cohen does a great service with her young adult novels. She writes books that show young adults they are not alone in their struggles. She reveals to adults the world they may not have realized exists. These are the black lies of a society that has too often lost track of values and lost sight of priorities. We can only be grateful for authors such as Cohen to remind us: the mask will eventually come off and we will have to face the painful consequences.

~Zinta Aistars for The Smoking Poet, Winter 20009-10 Issue