#myfavoritebook: We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
Megan Raible // Blog Writer
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
Delacorte Press // January 1, 2014
242 pages
We Were Liars is an artfully crafted thrill ride of a novel that cannot be put down. This is the kind of novel that a reader sits down with and finishes in a single sitting. After its release in 2014, I actually put off reading this book. Once I finally took the plunge and jumped into this novel, it was completely impossible to stop.
We Were Liars is an ambiguous story filled with beautiful, incredibly well written prose. Cadence, the main character, is a member of the rich and prestigious Sinclair family. She spends extravagant summers hopping gleefully between the family beach houses off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard with her two cousins and a close family friend. Together, they form The Liars and engage in the hijinks-filled summers that every reader wishes they had growing up, but then everything goes wrong. Suddenly, Cadence has a mysterious accident in her fifteenth summer that leaves her isolated from all of the other Liars and away from the beach houses for two years.
As Cadence returns to the island and tries to piece together the events of that fateful summer, the reader is as lost as she is. E. Lockhart does a wonderful job of giving the reader enough information to slowly click together the pieces, but this books is like a 1,000 piece puzzle. Through a careful attention to all the characters and slowly developing each of their personalities, the story begins to take shape. Lockhart’s artful prose, which at times borders on poetry, only provides individual pieces and it is not until the very end that the whole image is finally crystal clear.
I have read more Young Adult novels than I can possibly count in my years, including several by E. Lockhart, but I have never read anything like We Were Liars. The ending had the most shocking plot twist I have ever read and the heartbreak I experienced immediately skyrocketed this book to the top of my favorites list. We Were Liars is strange, abstract, and beautifully written. This is the type of book that makes readers sit up and listen to and the type of book that stays in a reader’s mind forever once it’s over.