Since I will be teaching Young Adult Literature at UCLA for the library masters program there starting April 1 (after a two-year hiatus since the last time I taught it), I am scrambling to catch up on my YA reading. Although the class deals primarily with the history of young adult lit, I certainly want to be up to the minute on my knowledge of what’s new and popular. So I splurged and ordered a few books from Amazon to read and review during my ramp-up to the class.

I should have known, the minute that I heard Jennifer Lynn Barnes had written a new book, that it would be good; but when an author has done a particular kind of story well and then writes something completely different, there’s always the fear that the magic touch won’t hold up when the genre is changed.

I have read and enjoyed Barnes’s series The Naturals multiple times; I read the first two in the series with my high school book club when I worked as a teen librarian, and then was happily entertained by the remainder of the books as they emerged. I also enjoyed her series that begins with The Fixer, about political intrigue in Washington D.C.

When I saw that she had written a book about southern debutantes, I thought Uh-oh, partly because I have read two or three of those by other authors who took a perfectly good set-up and turned it into puerile insta-love. I should have had faith in Barnes: Even though the premise couldn’t be more different than that of a set of gifted youth working covertly for the FBI, Little White Lies is fantastic in every way.

The concept of starting out in the middle of a particular scenario on a particular day in April and then jumping backwards in ever-lessening increments (nine months earlier, three months earlier, six hours earlier) is itself designed to hold the reader’s interest: What happened today, and what led up to it? At some point, late in the book, when you begin to figure out what’s going on, you will undoubtedly (as I did) thumb back through its pages to read those one-or two-page interludes sequentially and get a giggle out of them.

The other thing that really separated this from run of the mill was the outsider status of the protagonist, Sawyer, The reader sees a slice of her world (regular, if a bit bleak), and then experiences with her the contrast between that and the one from which she originally emerged, and would have grown up in but for her mother’s rejection of that lifestyle. Her new knowledge of her family gets to be revealed to her in a way that both validates and contradicts her mother’s version of events; but her mother has raised her with the ability to judge for herself, and that’s what is important amidst the disconnect.

If all of this weren’t enough, however, you also get the bonus story of secrets, scandals, blackmail, and revenge, with all the anticipation and satisfaction those bring. This book is clever, witty, and humorous in the most perfect of dark ways. And although it stands alone, one tiny detail is left dangling temptingly at the end for Barnes to pick up and continue from, should she decide a sequel is in order (which seems likely, since this book is labeled “#1” on Goodreads).

What can I do but echo the most used phrase of the debutantes and their eagle-eyed mamas when I say to Barnes, “Bless your heart”?