The Truth and Lies of Ella Black (2024)

Ella Black seems like a normal 17 year-old girl but she has two secrets. One she knows about: her violent, sad*stic alter-ego Bella. The other secret is one kept by her parents and the fear that Ella might discover this secret, cause them to pull her out of school without warning and take her to Brazil. Ella is cross and when she can't get a rational reason from her parents she resorts to some snooping. It is then that she discovers that she is adopted. Spinning out of control she runs away and eventually ends up in the favelas in RIo. But her search for information about her birth mother leads her to the greater secret her parents were protecting her from.The subtitle, '40 days until she dies', along with the countdown chapter headings, give the impression that this is a thriller that will end badly for Ella. However, Ella's story is not really a thriller and the subtitle is quite misleading. It is the story of a messed up teenage girl trying to cope with the upending of her life. Ella is often annoying and self-centred (just like real teenagers) and the way she falls in love at first sight is a bit unbelievable but the story of her time in the favelas is interesting

Just a warning for sensitive readers - this novel does contain on scene of pretty horrific animal abuse. This is really early on in the book and never reoccurs, yet I did feel that it was graphic and unnecessary. You have been warned.I was really excited to read this novel as I loved Flora Banks, but unfortunately I was left feeling really disappointed. This novel shared a lot of similarities with Flora Banks - the controlling parents, the life-long deception, the running away to to a foreign country - but it just did not work this time. The repetitive nature of the dialogue worked in Flora Banks because of her memory issues. Here, it just felt dry.Although the premise of the novel is intriguing, I personally felt that it lost its momentum once Ella reached Brazil. The novel just felt unfocused, never really sticking with any thread for long. Although Ella meets a lot of different people at different stages of her journey, these are always left behind as she moves on. The novel has its share of twists and turns but these seemed to lack tension as they never really built to anything in the tale. Everything comes too easily to Bella. She runs away in a city that she does not know, unable to speak the local language, yet she some how comes up on top by landing herself a teaching job with no passport or references. Whaaaat?Even the climax felt a bit lacklustre as Ella did not even confront her parents about her lies directly. It just ended with a letter that she wrote to them, a year after the events of the story. For me, this really lacked closure. There was no sense of Ella facing her problems. They just all seemed to flit away during that unseen year. I'm not even sure what the tagline on the front of the book really means, as there is no sense of Ella "dying", despite what the chapter headlines lead you to believe.Yet, the biggest issue I had with the story was Ella herself. While it is easy to feel a degree of sympathy towards her, she does not make it easy to do so. From the animal abuse of the first chapter to her later tantrums, she is nothing short of a brat. It annoyed me no end that she faced no ramifications for the things that she does as "Bella". It's clear that she has some kind of serious mental illness, yet no one ever really addresses this.She also is terrible to her parents. Without spoiling anything, I do agree that she has a right to be angry at them for hiding things from her. However, she never truly forgives them. She runs away to the suburbs of Rio and NEVER directly interacts with them again. This is really, really frustrating. You would never believe that she was almost eighteen. She talks and behaves more like a thirteen year old.The novel also contains a really frustrating insta-love between Ella and Christian. Christian is a darling and I really don't understand what he sees in Ella. They go out on one date and he is so smitten with her that he's prepared to lie for her to the police, send her money and offer her the chance to live with him in Miami. Yeah, this isn't a very realistic novel.All in all, you might be able to tell that I was disappointed. This novel did not captivate me like Flora Banks did. While I was intrigued for a while, I lost interest when it became clear what was truly going on. Most of my issues were centred around Ella herself, who I found to be a frustrating and immature protagonist. This is certainly not a novel that I'd recommend.

I have always believed that authors of YA books like to deal in harrowing topics, the more tear-jerking the better. This one opens with a scene of graphic violence against an animal which was completely unnecessary. It may have set the scene for Ella and her alter ego, Bella (a contraction of Bad Ella) but again, unnecessary to the plot. Instead, it put me off the story and my interest never caught on. I found the characters ranged from boring and silly to obnoxious. Barr scored a "miss" on this one.

I was really excited to get into this book, unfortunately the excited faded shortly into it. It paints itself as a thriller/mystery but it was poorly handled. I was honestly confused right from the beginning. Trust me, I'm not bashing mental illness at all, but it was thrown into the mix too quickly and without explanation and *slight spoiler* mental illness is no excuse for animal abuse. I would have DNF'd this book shortly thereafter but its a pretty short read so I figured I'd power through and just see if it got better. It didn't. The story is all over the place and the events that happen are so ridiculous that you spend the whole time going "that's never going to happen like that". Ella comes off as a spoiled little brat and must have the best luck in the entire world for everything to just happen like that for her. It's super unrealistic. My 2 star rating for specifically for the ending. Although the writing was as weak as a plot line, the ending did surprise me.

This novel is the story of Ella Black, a regular teenager with a dark side she calls Bella. One day, just before she turns 18, her parents pick her up from school and take her out of the country without telling her the reason why. This was a really enjoyable read and though a young adult novel, it entertained me as an adult reader. It keeps the reader wanting to keep turning pages to see what was going to happen yet!

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s early reviewers program — thank you!I wanted to like this one. The synopsis is so compelling and had so much promise. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the book for me. Between the instalove, the horrifying instance of animal cruelty (seriously, horrible to read), the writing style that I couldn’t connect with, the frustrating characters... not what I hoped it would be.