We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Wow. That was….bad.
I know that many people have absolutely loved this book but it is just simply, not great.
Cady Sinclair is a girl from a very rich family who spends their summers on their private island. Something strange happened one summer and Cady begins suffering from migraines and memory loss. Two years later, Cady is trying to find out what exactly happened. That’s all I can really say without spoiling it.
The characters are unlikable, I was completely unsympathetic to the narrator, and the writing style is not my favorite at all.
Starting with the characters, they just seem so unrealistic? The conversations are vapid and feel like what aliens think teenage humans speak like. The main character herself is pretty, spoiled, and rich but somehow we’re supposed to feel sorry for her. I definitely didn’t. I mean I obviously didn’t enjoy her suffering, but I couldn’t empathize with her whatsoever.
Then there’s Gat who is supposed to be the outsider. He is the nephew of the boyfriend of one of the aunts on the island and he is the only one who doesn’t come from money. While he makes some excellent points about how the Sinclair family is enjoying so much wealth while so much of the world lives in poverty, I feel like the conversations surrounding these topics were very surface level and didn’t move me as much as they should have. They were also punctuated by the oh-so-kind chastising of Cady when she says that she spent her summer in Europe and specifically in Rome laying face down in the bathroom, in pain, staring at the toilet. Instead of any kind of normal human response, he decides to tell her essentially that she can’t complain because some people don’t even get to go to Rome and she has it so good. Wow. Yikes.
The writing itself is a personal preference thing. The sentences were choppy and
inexplicably
did this
sometimes
without any warning.
Not super fun to read in my opinion.
The only thing saving this book from a 1-star rating is the ending. The not spoiler review is that it was so unexpected. I really did not see that coming at all and it did make some things make more sense in hindsight.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!!!
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Why would I continue to feel sorry for Cady after learning that she committed arson and accidentally killed three people? I understand that it was an accident and it could have been any one of the Liars that killed the others but it was a silly, childish plan from the start. The characters were such rebels-without-a-cause it was the final straw of dislikability.
