Debbie's Reviews > The Thing About the Truth

The Thing About The Truth is told from the perspectives of Isaac and Kelsey. It’s told before and after the incident (Face It Down Day) in both of their perspectives. It was pretty cool that there were four mini stories in one book. But the idea was typical and boring, nothing stood out. The characters were choppy and annoying, I felt like Lauren Barnholdt didn’t develop her characters well and that the main characters were contradicting themselves as well as boring. Without many facts about their past. Out of the two of them, I disliked Kelsey the most because she was just plain annoying and whiny.

Kelsey Romando was the worst character out of the two of them with her trying to be a good student at the public school. The character of Kelsey wasn’t as good as she was trying to be, she wasn’t a bad ass either because she was kind of uptight. She was very annoying, whiny, and stupid for the most part. She told stupid lies and became attracted to Isaac because he was a ‘bad boy’.

Isaac Bernardo was not a bad ass. Yes, he did punch a few people but that was it. Lauren Barnholdt was trying to get the point across that Isaac was dark and mysterious but instead he was just a guy who listened to everything Kelsey told him to do (what kind of bad boy listens to what other people say?). Isaac quickly lost his interesting qualities once him and Kelsey got too comfortable with each other. He turned into a lovesick puppy too quickly and too suddenly that it annoyed me a lot.

The writing style was really annoying because it was written as if it was a diary, so they both talked a lot about things that didn’t matter. For most of the story, whenever it switched to Kelsey’s point of view, Lauren Barnholdt would start the chapter with the word, “okay”. Almost every time and I get pretty irritated about it. After reading the synopsis, this sounded pretty good but the story is almost completely different from what I thought it would be in a bad sense because the story was boring. Also, I wished that there was more drama and action surrounding “Face It Down” day. The whole story surrounds what happened that day but it really let my hopes down because only two things happened and then they almost got expelled. The sad part was, no one would have gotten into as much trouble as Kelsey or Isaac did for throwing a punch.

“Face It Down” day was a huge disappointment full of snobby girls acting like they were royalty and boys getting jealous over one girl. The ending of The Thing About The Truth was very typical. I honestly knew what was going to happen when I was only halfway done the book. There were no surprises, not very much action, and they were angry at each other over petty mistakes. And do not be fooled by this amazing cover because it doesn’t go with the characters at all. They look completely different which irritated me a bit because they cover of books always helps me to visualize the characters better.

There was very little that I actually enjoyed about this book. One of those things was that the story went back and forth between the two characters as well as told the story before and after the incident. I thought that was really cool because you got the whole entire story that way. Even though I didn’t like The Thing About The Truth very much, I’m still very excited to read Two Way Street.