”We are liars.
We are beautiful and privileged.
We are cracked and broken.
A tale of love and romance.
A tale of tragedy.
Which are lies?
Which is truth?
You decide.”
We Were Liars is a novel written by the writer Emily Lockhart and it revolves around the Sinclair family – a beautiful, perfect family – a family that meets up every summer on a small island called Beechwood Island. We follow the eldest granddaughter of the head of the family, Cadence Sinclair, whose life we are told of – her cousins, her love for the boy Gat and her actions on the island. But not everything is as perfect as it seems, and throughout the novel, the truth will slowly unfold itself.
As I started out reading We Were Liars I was very fast to jump to conclusions and was honestly expecting nothing but another cliché love story. Oh, how wrong I was. The novel is about love, yes, but it is really about so much more than that.
After a while the novel starts to focus more on the Sinclair family than on love – it shows that a perfect and rich American family might not always be perfect. And the novel shows how Cadence’s sanity and innocence slowly falter and break.
What is amazing about this book is the way it was written to “mess with your mind”, so to speak. The structure of the paragraphs and the many jumps back and forth in time are usually things I’m not very fond of in books, but in We Were Liars these almost poetic elements created a very thrilling and suspenseful atmosphere.
The novel is full of twists and turns that you really cannot foresee. As the truth slowly unfolded while I read the novel, I was eager and frustrated at the same time – I wanted to figure out the truth so badly, but no matter how much I thought I had figured everything out, the novel kept surprising me till the very end.
We Were Liars is a tragedy as well as an eye opener and the novel is perfect for people, like me, who is tired of clichés and likes to be surprised.
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart (English), 225 pages, Hot Key Books
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