The Julian Game by Adele Griffin

Publication Date: August 26, 2010
ARC Source: Around the World Tours
Summary From Goodreads:

New girl Raye Archer is desperate for a way into the In crowd, so when ice-queen Ella Parker chooses her to get back at her ex, the gorgeous Julian Kilgarry, Raye is more than game. Even if it means creating a fake Facebook identity as “Elizabeth” so that she can learn enough about Julian to sabotage him. While a fun and dangerous thrill at first, what Raye hadn’t counted on was falling for Julian herself—and igniting Ella’s rage.

As Raye works to reconcile the temptress Elizabeth with her real-life self, Ella serves up her own revenge. Now it’s Raye who falls victim, as Ella creates an online smear campaign of nasty rumors and trashy photographs. Suddenly notorious, Raye has to find a way out of the web of deceit that she’s helped to build, and back to the relationships that matter.

Adele Griffin’s riveting novel explores the issues of generation Facebook: the desire to be someone else, real versus online friends, and the pitfalls and fallouts of posting your personal life online for all the world to judge.

My Two Cents:

What I did like: The cover. The wig, the gloves, everything about this cover is mysterious and pulls you in making you want to immediately crack open this book to find out why this wig was such a huge impact on Julian.

The beginning was just okay for me. The main character, Raye, was smart, always made straight A's and on scholarship at a prestigious all girls school. She had one best friend who was my favorite character of all. She was a nerd, and a little weird to most people. BUT she knew who she was, and was very comfortable with it. It was Raye who wanted more. She certainly got more than she bargained for when she let slip to the very popular Ella that she can be very vengeful. Just so happens...Ella was looking for revenge on her ex-boyfriend Julian. I felt sorry for Julian at first but then I realized that he was a complete jerk. The romance factor in this book fell pretty flat for me. It didn't make me believe it was real because it moved too quickly. There was no build up to the heavy kissing and groping. It just appeared on the next page. We all know I'm all for the sexy stuff but it should be eased into a bit to be believable.

The dialogue in this book really bugged me. I like to think of myself as pretty hip, but the slang the author used seemed a bit made up.  Words like "Looze", which I thought meant loser but apparently had a different definition. That made the characters seem a bit unreal.I just couldn't imagine real teenagers speaking like that.

Now about the huge revenge on Julian, it was not huge at all. In fact, it was a huge disappointment. I was expecting a lot more from this book based on the blurb on the back and the promising cover. When I got to the last page, I thought this ARC was possibly missing pages but it was not. I felt that it still had some unresolved issues. I really wanted to like this one, but between the characters, the dialogue, and the plot it just didn't work out for me.

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