Review: We Were Liars by e. lockhart

I loved this book!! I finally feel like I’m finding my stride with reading again after a bit of a reading slump. And this book helped pull me out of it and get me excited for reading again, because it’s just SO GOOD!

The book is about Cadence, a young girl who comes from a rich and large family. The family is ruled by Cadence’s grandfather, and every summer they go to their private island and frolic around eating lobster and taking the boats out and whatnot. One year Cadence has an accident that leaves her with selective amnesia about that summer and debilitating migraines. The year after this she doesn’t go to the island, and when she returns the following summer, she has decided to try to figure out what happened to her. No one seems to want to tell her anything about the summer of the accident, but she slowly unravels the mystery, and it was a twist that I did not see coming! And it was good!

I was feeling a bit apprehensive when I first started reading the book, because I was a little confused about all of the family history that came first. To be honest, there is an illustrated family tree at the beginning of the book, that I didn’t really bother to look at, which would probably have helped. 

So I found the beginning a little confusing and a metaphor about being shot in the heart did not help, since it was written, as if it actually happened. So I actually thought Cadence had been shot! And I thought it was a little insensitive of her mother to tell her to get up and get over it….It took an embarrassingly long time for me to realize it was a metaphor…But this style of writing metaphors continues throughout the book, and I did finally understand that mentions of slit wrists and blood were meant to metaphors and not to be taken literally. The writing style in general takes a little getting used to, but once you get there, it’s good.

The story is told from Cadence’s perspective, and we follow her frustrating search for the truth about her accident. Sometimes I felt like shaking the other characters, when they were being mysterious, and just shouting “TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED”, and I didn’t really understand why Cadence didn’t do just that. It all becomes clear in the end though. When the plot twist is revealed, it is truly shocking. You think you must have missed some clues in the story, but when you go back over it, there is really no way you could have figured it out. But that is a good thing. Once you know the twist, things make more sense than they did before, even though they did not necessarily seem weird before. And if you go back knowing the twist you will find small clues scattered throughout the story, but nothing that could lead you to the conclusion that is the twist. And that is a plot twist well done, in my opinion. 

I gave this book 4,5 stars out of 5 stars on Goodreads. The last half star is missing because of my confusion in the beginning. The writing style does take a little getting used to, so that subtracts just a tiny bit of stardom for me.