The Book:
Are You Sara? by S.C. Lalli
Published August 9th 2022 by William Morrow & Company
Date read: August 25, 2022
The Characters:
Sara Bhaduri and Sarah Ellis
Buy it on Bookshop.org | Amazon
The Plot (from Goodreads):
Two women named Sara each get into a rideshare. . . but only one makes it home alive. Which Sara was the real target?
Law student Saraswati “Sara” Bhaduri holds down two jobs in order to make her way through school, but it’s still a struggle. She’s had to do things to pay the bills that most people wouldn’t expect from “a nice Indian girl.” It seems like an ordinary busy Tuesday night at the local dive bar until her boss demands Sara deal with a drunk girl in the bathroom.
The two become fast friends. Why? Because they both have the same name. And despite their different circumstances, the two connect. When they both order rideshares home, they tumble in the back of the cars and head out into the night.
But when Sara awakes in her rideshare, she finds she’s on the wrong side of town—the rich side—and she realizes: she and Sarah took the wrong cars home.
With no money, Sara walks back to her apartment on the shady side of town only to discover police lights flashing and a body crumpled on her doorstep: Sarah.
Was Sarah Ellis or Sara Bhaduri the target? And why would anyone want either of them dead?
In this smart, twisty novel about ambition, wealth, and dangerous longing, the layers are peeled back on two young women desperate to break out of the expectations placed on them, with devastating results.
The Twist:
Sara had a stalker: In her first year of law school, she got mixed up with Jason, thinking he would offer her a job after she worked as his assistant for a year. Jason usually just used Sara as arm candy with big clients, but eventually Sara realized something fishier was going on. Ollie, one of the clients, was using 15-year-old girls for sex, and threatened them into staying under his employ. Sara had had enough, so she called the cops on Ollie and Jason and told Jason she wouldn’t work for him anymore.
Sara assumed Jason was responsible for killing Ellis, since they looked very similar. When Jason comes back asking for another favor and threatening Sara’s little sister, Sara is able to drug and restrain him. Jason says he didn’t kill Ellis and wasn’t even in the country that night.
The guy that introduced himself to Sara as Tommy Eagle was actually Nathan. Nathan had been sexually assaulting Ellis, and followed her home from the bar and killed her. He thought she was going to some other guy’s house when the Uber she was in didn’t go to Ellis’s parents’ house. Nathan had broken into Sara’s apartment to hide from the police.
The Ending:
Sara decided to get a job from Jason after law school. They brokered a deal: he would get her a real job at his law firm, and she would keep working for him off the books. She demanded a seat at the real table doing the actual deals, and also half the profits.
The Review:
I adored Sonya Lalli’s A HOLLY JOLLY DIWALI when I read it during the holidays last year, so I was very interested when I heard she branched out into thrillers. ARE YOU SARA? starts out with a great premise: two girls named Sara(h) call Ubers at the same time, but get in the wrong car. When Sara makes it back to her own apartment after being dropped off at Sarah’s house, there are police everywhere: Sarah was killed right outside Sara’s house. The two girls look similar, and Sarah was in a car meant for Sara. Naturally Sara begins to wonder whether she just narrowly escaped death…
Wow, don’t read this review out loud, I guess. It’s a lot easier to keep the Sara(h)s straight when you can see whether or not I’m using the “h”!
From there, the story unfolds via Sara’s POV in present day, interspersed with some journal entries that Sarah wrote before she died. To me it felt like the diary entries were written way earlier, but I kept forgetting that Sarah was a lot younger than Sara.
I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the two girls’ backgrounds, and the book was well-paced. The ending was satisfying and not what I expected!
I’ll be keeping an eye out for Sonya Lalli’s next book in either genre.
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