Some books hand you a plot. This one hands you a deck of tarot cards and dares you to trust the pull. The Lovers, the Liars, and Me by DeAndra Davis is the second novel from the Morris Award winning author of All the Noise at Once, and it might be the most emotionally honest YA romance of the year. Part coming of age story, part queer awakening, part love letter to Jamaica written by someone who clearly adores the island and refuses to lie about it, this book earns both its swoons and its stings.
The Opening Pull: What the Story Is About
Jaliya Powell is a valedictorian who has never been kissed, never thrown a punch for herself, and never quite figured out how to be seen. Days before graduation, a battered, unsigned letter arrives at her Florida home. The return address is destroyed, but the message is clear: someone misses her and wants to see her. Jaliya becomes convinced it came from her mother, who left for Jamaica when she was four and never looked back.
So she books five weeks in Kingston with her uncle’s family, telling everyone it is one last vacation before college. Her real plan is a search. What she finds instead is a cousin who has grown cold and secretive, a childhood crush named Andre who is taken and somehow more charming than ever, and India, a loc’d, sharp tongued girl who smells like ginger and makes Jaliya feel something she has no name for yet.
The blurb promises a love triangle. The book delivers one, but the triangle is honestly the least interesting lie in a novel absolutely stuffed with them.
A Card for Every Chapter: Structure and Style
Davis structures all 27 chapters around tarot cards from Jaliya’s mother’s old deck, and the device works far better than it has any right to. The Fool opens the adventure, The Tower arrives exactly when everything collapses, and The Lovers lands where you hope it will. The cards are Jaliya’s last physical link to her mother, and watching her relationship to them shift across the summer becomes a quiet second plot about faith, grief, and learning to trust your own voice.
The prose is first person, present tense, and genuinely funny. Jaliya narrates like a real anxious teenager: self deprecating, dramatic, prone to spiraling mid sentence. Davis also writes Jamaica with all five senses turned up. You can smell the ackee and saltfish, taste the Devon House ice cream, feel the burn of jerk pork cooked in a pit of beach sand in Montego Bay. Blue Hole, Fern Gully, Dunn’s River Falls, Emancipation Park, Reggae Sumfest, the haunted Flat Bridge over the Rio Cobre: the settings never feel like a tourist brochure because they are filtered through a diaspora kid who is terrified of being called a tourist herself.
The Lovers: A Triangle That Actually Means Something
Most YA love triangles are marketing. This one is characterization. Andre is warmth, history, and safety, a boy who remembers how Jaliya climbs trees. India is risk, electricity, and the future, a girl who sees exactly who Jaliya is before Jaliya does. Choosing between them is really Jaliya choosing between the self she has always been and the self she is becoming, and Davis never cheapens either option. India, in particular, is one of the best written love interests in recent YA: confident without being a fantasy, generous without being a prop, and carrying her own grief that the book treats with real care.
The Liars: Family, Faith, and the Cost of Silence
The secrets are where “The Lovers, the Liars, and Me” grows teeth. Jaliya’s cousin Shevaughn is hiding something that could cost him his family in a country where, as the book states plainly, being openly gay can still be dangerous. Davis, writing from her own Jamaican background, threads a difficult needle here. She loves this culture, its food, its music, its churches, and she still names its homophobia without flinching. The Bible study scenes, the whispered conversations, the fear in Shevaughn’s voice: none of it reads like an outsider scoring points. Her author’s note makes clear how personal this material is, and it shows on every page.
Layered underneath is the ache of being first generation. Jaliya is teased for her food on the school bus in Florida and side eyed for her accent in Kingston, too American for one home and too foreign in the other. The book’s answer, that culture is not a test you can fail and family is something you can also choose, is delivered with enough specificity to feel earned rather than preachy.
What Works Best
- Jaliya’s voice. Anxious, witty, and believably seventeen, she carries the book even when the plot idles.
- The bisexual awakening. Confusion, denial, joy, and fear all get room to breathe. The famous “cars and trucks” conversation between the cousins is both hilarious and quietly devastating.
- The friend group. Deon’s chaotic loyalty and India’s steadiness make the found family theme land.
- The sense of place. Jamaica is a character, complicated and beloved, never a backdrop.
- The ending. The final chapters resolve the mother question in a way that surprised me and felt truer than any reunion could have.
Where It Stumbles
- The middle third sags. Several outings blur together as travelogue, and the search stalls while the romance simmers.
- One mid book caper involving records strains believability hard, even by summer adventure standards.
- A late romantic moment crosses a consent line. The story names the problem, which I appreciated, but forgives it a little too quickly.
- Ketta, the best friend back home, and Auntie Mary both deserve more page time than they get.
- The final pages tie one academic thread into a bow so neat it slightly undercuts the messiness the rest of the book worked so hard to honor.
None of these flaws sink the story. They do keep a very good book from being a great one, which matches the warm but not rapturous reception The Lovers, the Liars, and Me by DeAndra Davis has earned from early readers.
Who Should Read This Book
Hand this to readers aged fourteen and up who loved messy, big hearted queer romance, anyone from a diaspora family who has ever felt like a guest in their own culture, and any teen quietly wondering whether liking more than one gender makes them a puzzle to be solved. It is spoiler sensitive by design, so go in knowing as little as possible. Sensitive readers should note the content includes homophobia, religious tension, underage drinking, and parental abandonment, all handled thoughtfully.
Similar Books to Read Next
If The Lovers, the Liars, and Me by DeAndra Davis leaves you hungry for more, try these:
- Hurricane Summer by Asha Bromfield, another diaspora daughter’s transformative Jamaican summer
- Ophelia After All by Racquel Marie, for a tender bisexual awakening in senior year
- Instructions for Dancing by Nicola Yoon, romance and grief from a Jamaican American author
- The Stars and the Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus, queer Caribbean love across borders
- You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson, for joyful sapphic firsts
- All the Noise at Once by DeAndra Davis, her award winning debut about brotherhood and autism
Final Verdict
Funny, sensory, and braver than its sunny cover suggests, The Lovers, the Liars, and Me by DeAndra Davis is a summer romance that understands the scariest love story of all is learning to like yourself. It wobbles in the middle and occasionally reaches for convenience, but its heart never once rings false. Come for the kiss. Stay for the girl who finally stops asking permission to exist.
