Breaking News and Broken Hearts: My Sources Say Review

I've been craving a sister story for a while, so when I heard about Sources Say by Lori Goldstein -- a contemporary involving sister rivalry -- I had to try it out! I definitely got what I came for, but I also got heapings of drama, a dash of mystery, and a spicy swirl of social critique.

Let's get into it!


Book Title: Sources Say
Author: Lori Goldstein
Publisher/Year: Razorbill, 2020
Genre: Contemporary
Number of Pages (According to Goodreads): 300
My Rating: 4 out of 5

Book description (from Goodreads):
Two exes. One election. All the drama.

For fans of Becky Albertalli and Morgan Matson comes a funny, hearfelt novel about fueding exes running for class president and the scandal that makes the previously boring school election the newest trending hashtag.

At Acedia High School outside of Boston, student council has always been nothing more than a popularity contest. Nobody pays attention. Nobody cares.

But all that changes when the Frankengirls show up. During the very first week of school, someone plasters the halls with Photoshopped images of three "perfect tens"--images of scantily clad girls made from real photos of girls at school. The student body is livid. And the two presidential candidates, Angeline Quinn and Leo Torres, jump on the opportunity to propose their solutions and secure votes. After their messy break up, Leo and Angie are fighting tooth and nail to win this thing and their constituents are mesmerized as they duke it out.

As if things couldn't be more dramatic, the school's two newspapers get involved. The Red & Blue is run by Angie's sister Cat and she prides herself on only reporting the facts. But her morals are tested when The Shrieking Violet--written by an anonymous source and based less on facts and more on fiction--blatantly endorses Leo. Rumors fly, secrets are leaked, and the previously mundane student election becomes anything but boring.

As the blurb promises, this was a super fun read that explores themes of ethical journalism, politics, and how we consume information in the modern era.

I was hooked the second the book started getting into Cat's and Angeline's respective passions of journalism and YouTubing. At first, they seem to be pretty different mediums, but as the story goes on we get an exploration of how both newspapers and YouTube videos can be used to spread information -- for better and for worse!

This also parallels how Cat and Angeline clash at first, but learn that they have more in common than they think by the end of the story. I thought it was a great way to explore sisterhood through an interesting lens, and it gave me all the cute sibling feels, too!

There's also a little mystery about who exactly was responsible for the Frankengirls, and since I'm a mystery fan, I really appreciated that angle. I also didn't see the culprit coming, so thumbs up from me on that one.

The one thing that dampened my enjoyment of this book a little is that the writing style jumps around a bit too much for my taste. The chapters alternate between Cat's and Angeline's points of view, and they would frequently start by kind of dumping the reader in the middle of a scene. Luckily, it didn't take away from my enjoyment too much, and I still really appreciated getting the story from both sisters' perspectives!

Final Thoughts

Overall, I found this to be an engaging story that made me think about our current-day issues of how the mainstream news interacts with social media. It was also a pretty cathartic way of dealing with the stress over the real election :P

Thanks to Penguin Teen for the ARC of this book! Sources Say comes out on September 8th, so if this sounds like something you'd like, go ahead and swipe your copy now :D

Barnes and Noble | Bookshop.org | Amazon | Goodreads

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