As an Amazon Associate, Natively earns from qualifying purchases through any Amazon links on the site.
All of our Movie & TV metadata comes from the wonderful project,
The Movie Database. Thank you! While we are permitted to use the TMDB API, we have not been endorsed or certified by TMDB.
Great beginner novel
We follow two POVs in in Mentirosa: that of Nina, an up-and-coming high school basketball player, and Alexia, that nerdy girl over in the corner who wants to work for NASA someday. One day, Nina takes a video of and uploads a clip of two girls at a party and makes a derogatory joke about them being lesbians, setting off an online uproar amongst her followers. All of a sudden Nina's best chance of getting into college (through a full-ride sports scholarship) is in jeopardy as recruiters find the controversial video. Desperate to save her chances, Nina proposes to Alexia that they pretend to go out so that it looks like Nina's not a homophobe, but just a closeted lesbian herself.
The story is a pretty straightforward high school romance, and what it may lack in originality is made up for by being a fairly easy read in learner's terms. There's some technical basketball vocab, but the vast majority is good ol' everyday school and life stuff. You get a smattering of teenage slang and some swear words, so it felt fairly well-rounded to me. The chapters also tend to be fairly short, averaging around 10 pages per chapter (with exceptions, of course).