Love & Lies: Marisol's Story »

Ellen Wittlinger is the critically acclaimed author of the teen novels Love & Lies: Marisol's Story, Parrotfish, Blind Faith, Sandpiper, Heart on My Sleeve, Zigzag, and Hard Love (an American Library Association Michael L. Printz Honor Book and a Lambda Literary Award winner), and the middle-grade novel Gracie's Girl. She has a bachelor's degree from Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. A former children's librarian, she lives with her husband in Haydenville, Massachusetts.

Marisol Guzman from Hard Love is older and wiser. She has graduated from high school and deferred Stanford for a year so she can pursue her newest dream, writing a novel. She has taken an apartment in Somerville with her best friend Birdie, a waitressing job at the legendary Mug in Cambridge, and signed up for "How To Write Your First Novel" at the adult learning annex.

But on the first day, she isn't sure what is a bigger suprise, that Gio is in her class or that it is being taught by Olivia Frost, the most beautiful, intelligent woman she has ever laid eyes on. Between that; Birdie bringing home his new boyfriend (who is equally afraid of Marisol and the cat) to live with them; and Lee, a high school senior who has fallen head over heels for Marisol, she can hardly keep things straight. Especially once she herself falls into her first real relationship with the twenty-eight year old Olivia.

As Marisol becomes more and more involved with Olivia, she begins to wonder if she is too blinded by love to see the truth.

VOYA

Eighteen-year-old Marisol, an out-and-proud lesbian, is taking a year off before college to write a novel. Living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she makes ends meet by working at a local diner, where she meets sweet and shy Lee. Although Lee forms a crush on her, Marisol falls hard and fast for the elegant, enigmatic Olivia, who teaches Marisol's writing course. To Marisol's astonishment, Olivia returns her interest, and Marisol is soon swept up in a volatile affair beyond her ability to comprehend or control. In trying both to placate Olivia's jealousy and restrain (unsucessfully) her own attraction to Lee, Marisol's best intentions catch her in a web of lies. When those lies unravel, she discovers that some poor choices cannot be unmade. This engrossing novel is beautifully structured, with just the right balance of relationships, plot, and setting. The characters are realistic and sympathetic, although adults may be more sympathetic than teens to the hapless Marisol. Readers will understand Olivia's manipulative and deceitful nature, but teens with Marisol's lack of life experience might not so easily understand or forgive Marisol's confusion or her callous treatment of Lee. One thing they will understand, however, is her love of writing. Wittlinger, in reporting Marisol's assignments and using her responses as samples, offers the reader a veritable mini-course in writing. Although it can feel somewhat didactic, aspiring writers will lap it up. Recommend this book to them and to readers who like bittersweet romances with an edge. Reviewer: Rebecca C. Moore