An Academy for Liars

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use, emotional abuse, physical abuse, mental illness, graphic violence, racism, child sexual abuse, and death.

Lennon Carter is the protagonist of An Academy for Liars. She is 24-year-old Black woman with sparse tattoos on her arms, a thin nose, freckles, and long braids. At the beginning of the novel, Lennon is struggling to find direction and purpose in her life; she reflects that “[s]he had been in a bad way for months—unmoored, discordant, occupying her own body with a sense of unease, the way one might in an airport terminal or the lobby of a rent-by-the-hour motel. Her own flesh and bone a kind of liminal space” (1). She is engaged to a man who treats her poorly, takes medication for mental health issues that she doesn’t fully understand, and sees no path forward.

Even after Drayton offers her a way forward, Lennon’s insecurities remain. Dante offers her no promises of wealth or prosperity after graduation. When Lennon discovers that her classmates were offered these things, she spirals into self-doubt, wondering why she was offered nothing. She thinks: “Was her desperation to escape her former life that obvious to the admissions department? Did they know that anything […] would have been far more rewarding than the misery of her failing relationship with Wyatt and a life she was quite literally willing to die in order to escape?” (76).