E.Lockhart.
2014.
We Were Liars is the YA novel which tells the story of the rich Sinclair family who escape to their private island every summer. When a tragic accident leaves Cadence Sinclair with selective amnesia in summer-fifteen, she spends summer-seventeen, trying to re-piece the events that happened that night.
The book is about love, money, inheritance, selfishness, superiority, freedom, mystery, misery, racism, pain and family. It literally has it all. From the second page, this book drew me in and captured me.
There are no words to describe the way this story made me feel and left me. We Were Liars is a novel that has one of the biggest plot twists that I have ever read, so far, in my life. For that reason this is going to be a hard post to write because I cannot spoil this book for you, at all.
The book is written so beautifully, it has a very dreamy, in and out of this world, feel to it. It's metaphorically brilliant. This book made me remember love as I did as a child, sneaking out at night and laying in fields. It was a somewhat fantasy world and you just want to stay in this book forever. There are quotes in here, that I don't think I'll ever be able to forget; I even used one as my Twitter bio, I felt so connected to it.
The main fault in this book was that there were way too many characters introduced too early. I started reading this book very confused as to who was who and mainly who this story was about. It was really, about three quarters in, that I actually figured out who everyone was and their place.
The book is very non-linear and goes from the present to past quite frequently, especially with Cadence having flashbacks. It also jumped from different places, I felt, which didn't make it the easiest to follow and added to the earlier confusion of what was going on. It was exceptionally put together though and this could literally just be me.
We Were Liars is another Wolverhampton to London journey read and I read the whole thing. It's the kind of book you just can't put down. This novel main attraction is the huge secret of what happened that night and going into this I had no idea about it, it was only when I watched a review about it that I really got gripped. I needed to find out the secret at the end and I feel like if you don't know that there's something big that's going to happen, then you could easily feel disengaged with the story as a whole.
I found it really hard to imagine these characters and I don't know why, perhaps because there where so many of them or because they weren't greatly described. The book gave me a kind of Gossip Girl meets a somewhat Breakfast Club meets Breaking Bad feel. The 'Liars' were rich but they were also very childlike trying to be adults.
This story is one that I think, I'll think about for a very long time afterwards. I feel so attached to the story and the characters and I just cannot get over what happened that night. I literally had no idea that was coming. I suggest this book to everyone and beg you not to spoil the ending for yourself if you do read this.
