Book review: The best-laid plans go awry...

We might believe that as adults we are being infantilised by such things as TikTok, Instagram, and the silofication of our echo-chamber existence. 

We seem to aspire to life in Voltaire’s universe; in his book, 'Candide ou l’Optimism', in which everything is the best it could possibly be in the best of all possible worlds.

We curate and sanitise our profiles and images, aiming for an adolescent-like perfection, so that many of us are unable to venture forth from our dens, because the reality of ourselves is too disappointing to display in public.

There is an upside to being holed up: You have time, if it can be spared from doom-scrolling, to read a novel. 

Young adult literature is no longer confined to school libraries, but is out there for consumption by mature readers. And it is ideal for facing down this new, frightening world.

Characters have no need for post-processing techniques. Their eyes just are the greenest or bluest ever. 

Their cheekbones — if without acne — are high and chiselled. Their skin is smooth and unwrinkled, often with a smattering of freckles.

Nothing has yet damaged their psyches. They can even be as truly good and incredibly skilled as Katniss Everdene in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games.

But, in a tale like Karen M McManus’s Such Charming Liars, there are, as in Nabokov’s Lolita, already scars beneath the surface of baby-soft skins. McManus’s protagonists, Liam and Kat, were lost aged four and five, like babes in a wood, in Las Vegas.

Now in their teens, they meet again, only able to identify each other from photographs of Kat’s mother, Jamie, and Liam’s father, Luke, whose single-parent status was transfigured by an ill-starred wedding in a fake-Elvis set-up. The marriage lasted less than 24 hours, during which the little angels went missing.

Coincidentally — that’s YA fiction for you — both families end up at billionaire Ross Sutherland’s 82nd birthday party. 

Luke is planning another marriage — this time to Annelise Sutherland, an heiress. In a separate plot Jamie will steal Annalise’s ruby necklace and leave a fake in its place.

The best-laid plans often go awry, and even if the Sutherland compound had no security, these nefarious aims might well have been unachievable. 

This is because plan A is not up to muster and plans B, C, D, and E are useless.

It is said that the sins of the father are visited on the children, and the poor innocent youngsters, Liam and Kat, may be dragged down by their parents. 

But within the Sutherland family there is also a scion to combat the grown-ups.

The young Augustus Sutherland is of romantic interest to both Kat and Luke. If these three pull together, can they corral and defeat evil?

To some extent, Such Charming Liars is about the bridge between innocence and experience. What William Blake calls ‘deceitful wiles’ are hidden beneath the ‘charming lies’ of the adult characters.

But early in the story McManus plants an image that resembles the final line of Blake’s poem, ‘A Poison Tree’. 

There is a dead ‘foe outstretched beneath the tree’. Will the murder be solved, and the culprit arrested before the plucky three get hurt?

Can innocence be extended or is it time for Augustus, Luke, and Kat to join their elders in the uncertain forest of experience? And we, as adults, live there, too.