Society of Lies

by Lauren Ling Brown ★★★★☆

It’s May 2023, and Maya Mason is back at Princeton in the days leading up to the annual commencement ceremony. She’s joined by many of her fellow 2013 graduates, who are back on campus for their 10-year class reunion, but she has an extra reason to be back: her younger sister, Naomi, is graduating this year. Naomi was supposed to meet up with them, but hasn’t yet showed, and has been ghosting Maya since a terse phone call the day before. It turns out there’s a good reason that Maya has not heard from her sister: Naomi is dead.

Maya’s time at Princeton wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. As she says, “This place brings with it so many memories, and not all of them are good.” As an introverted mixed-race student, Maya had a hard time finding her place on campus. Princeton has, in lieu of fraternities and sororities, “eating clubs”. “They should really be called drinking clubs. “ Maya tells us, “but in the university’s eyes, ‘eating’ was more respectable.” About 80% of students engage in a process called “bicker”—effectively the equivalent of rush—which lands them in one of the eating clubs. Maya missed out her sophomore year, but during her junior year bicker her friend Daisy helps Maya get chosen for Sterling, one of the more prestigious eating clubs on campus.

But the eating club runs more than one layer deep. Inside Sterling House, there is a secret society called Greystone, an exclusive invitation-only sub-club of only 21 students, whose members not only garner extra status within Sterling, but who leverage an extensive network beyond campus for everything from job opportunities to societal advantages. As Daisy tells her, “Think of it as an early favor you spend the rest of your life repaying. That’s what makes the whole thing so successful.” Not only does Maya get accepted to Sterling, but she also gets tapped for Greystone. A society like that comes with strings attached, and Maya still has the scars from the secrets she kept while in school. As she begins to investigate the people with whom Naomi interacted, she comes to realize that some of those secrets could be tied to her sister’s death.

Author Lauren Ling Brown has a lot of good bones for Society of Lies, and much of the novel works well as a deep dive into the societal substructures that get established on college campuses (and beyond). She was determined to weave in her experience of growing up multiracial, and as she puts it, “never feeling like I fit in anywhere, not in my mostly white high school in Atherton, California, and, though it was more diverse in many ways, not in many spaces at Princeton.” She acknowledges that some of this could have been due to her shyness and awkwardness, but wanted to imprint those feelings of “being an outsider” onto Maya and Namoi and thereby transmit what that felt like to the reader.

Much of it works, but I found portions of the novel suffered from what's most likely a first-time author’s inexperience. Chapters alternate between Maya in present day (May 2023), Maya while she was a student at Princeton (2010-2013), and Naomi during the final months of her life. That should work, but a few things complicated it. To start, the sisters’ voices are nearly identical, so if you happen to skim over a chapter heading (including the date) it’s easy to imagine one sister is the other, or present-day Maya is actually college-age Maya. Furthermore, almost all secondary characters are present in at least two of the timelines, leading to additional confusion. Obviously that's mostly on the reader (i.e. - ME!) to simply pay closer attention, but I would have preferred a little more variation in tone between the sections.

Where things got a bit clunkier was around some of the plotting of the mystery, and in particular the character motivations leading up to the eventual reveal. Some inconsistencies and some unlikely choices prevented this from coming together into as tightly-knit a novel as some that are out there. It felt almost as if Brown was determined to throw in some misdirection, whether it made sense or not, and while she will keep most readers guessing, many of the suspects that Maya starts to latch onto as her sister’s likely killer lack at least one of motive, means, or opportunity.

It’s not bad; it’s just not great, and for me fell somewhere in the high-3 / low-4 range. When I compared it to the other books that I read in the category this year, it simply fell a bit short.