We Were Liars - E. Lockhart

Date Started: 12/14/14
Date Finished: 12/16/14

Around this time of year I start looking at the "Best of" lists for the year. What did Amazon think were the Best Books of 2014? What about Goodreads? What about the local bookstore? Or People magazine? There's typically a lot on the list that I haven't read - mostly because I read based on what looks good in the moment without doing a lot of research. So these lists give me a chance to look at a more curated selection and see what might be fun to add to my reading list. This book, "We Were Liars" was on a lot of lists. The premise looked intriguing and so I decided to squeeze it in before year-end.

Spoilers ahead. Seriously. The big ones.


Ok, so the family at the center of the story is exactly what you picture when you think of families who vacation in the Hamptons or on Martha's Vineyard. Blonde, wealthy, fit, blah blah blah stereotype. Of course they drink too much, of course husbands have left along the way, and of course nothing ever gets communicated among members of the family.

Here's what the School Library Journal (courtesy of Amazon) has to say in summary of the book:

Gr 9 Up—Cadence Sinclair Easton comes from an old-money family, headed by a patriarch who owns a private island off of Cape Cod. Each summer, the extended family gathers at the various houses on the island, and Cadence, her cousins Johnny and Mirren, and friend Gat (the four "Liars"), have been inseparable since age eight. During their fifteenth summer however, Cadence suffers a mysterious accident. She spends the next two years—and the course of the book—in a haze of amnesia, debilitating migraines, and painkillers, trying to piece together just what happened. Lockhart writes in a somewhat sparse style filled with metaphor and jumps from past to present and back again—rather fitting for a main character struggling with a sudden and unexplainable life change. The story, while lightly touching on issues of class and race, more fully focuses on dysfunctional family drama, a heart-wrenching romance between Cadence and Gat, and, ultimately, the suspense of what happened during that fateful summer. The ending is a stunner that will haunt readers for a long time to come.—Jenny Berggren, formerly at New York Public Library

And here is what I tweeted about this book after finishing it:
Just read "We Were Liars". Spoiler alert, the book = a Bruce Willis film. Won't say which one (it's not Die Hard). #meh #quickread

Yeah, so basically, what you have here, is the book version of "The Sixth Sense". ALL of the rest of the liars are dead (which our narrator finally realizes at the end of the book). All of her interactions with them past year 15 are with their ghosts (who have stuck around to help her with this realization). See, they were all angry and decided to start a fire to burn down the family home so that the family wouldn't fight about it anymore and would be forced to come together through the tragedy. But oops! Cadence isn't exactly an arson professional and so she accidentally traps the rest of the Liars in the house where they all perish.

Was I surprised by the ending? Yes. But then in thinking back on it, there were a lot of clues that I just didn't pick up on (rookie mistake). So there you have it. I'm sure it will become a movie.