First published 2026
Siya Kumar has had enough of people who lie. She joins her school's mock trial team partly to remember her mother, a lawyer who died in a car crash when Siya was ten. Her mother used to say truth burns lies away like fire. When Raj Raghavan, the soccer star who co-captains the team, shows interest in her, Siya can barely believe it. Things go perfectly until a team bonding trip goes wrong. Siya gets trapped overnight in a room with another boy until morning. She tells Raj nothing happened, but he seems doubtful. Then Siya notices something disturbing about their mock trial case. The details match her mother's death too closely to be coincidence. She starts questioning whether her mother really died in an accident. Award winner Rajani LaRocca retells the Ramayana in this contemporary story about a girl who must decide if uncovering truth is worth the cost.
Genres: literary-fiction, coming-of-age, mystery, contemporary, young-adult
Vibes: dark, emotional, introspective, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, mystery-unraveling, second-chance-romance, unreliable-narrator
Setting: school
Period: 21st-century
384 pages · Hardcover · Quill Tree Books
Content warnings: death