Book Review: E. Lockhart – “We Were Liars”

Cadence Sinclair Eastman comes from an old-money family, headed by a patriarch who owns a private island off of Cape Cod. Each summer, the extended family gathers at the various houses on the island, and Cadence, her cousins Johnny and Mirren, and friend Gat (the four “Liars”), have been inseparable since age eight. During their fifteenth summer however, Cadence suffers a mysterious accident. She spends the next two years—and the course of the book—in a haze of amnesia, debilitating migraines, and painkillers, trying to piece together just what happened. (Source: amazon.com)

I am probably the only person who did not read this book because she wanted to know what all the fuzz was about, but because it was suggested to me on amazon and the mixed reviews got me curious.

And it only took me less than 6 hours to finish it because I just couldn’t put it away for a minute.

At first, I was not sure what to make of it. All the different characters, the way that the narrator – Cadence, – is explaining all the different family members, the living circumstances on the island was somewhat really confusing for me at the beginning. It reminded me a lot of “A Casual Vacancy” by Joanne K. Rowling, which is the worst book I’ve read in my entire life. But then, all things fell into place.

The lovestory between Cady and Gat, her Aunt’s boyfriend’s nephew, is somewhat just like how teenage lovestories are: they meet in their holidays, fall in love, and when they’re back home, they forget about that summer fling. Not Cadence. While Gat seemingly has moved on with a girlfriend in New York, she realizes how far she has fallen for him. To me, it made her more human; a human with flaws who has no saying about who she loves, who cannot control her feelings and who, despite the circumstances, never give up on hoping for her Happy End. Cady takes the reader on her journey to not only find herself, but also, find out who her family is.

After the accident, which E. Lockhart described a bit hazy (in my personal opinion), so that I had to read it twice to actually understand what happened, the reader is constantly confronted with the fact that Cady suffers from a severe amnesia that goes along with constant migraine attacks that knock her out for days at times. That is probably the only thing that bugged me about the book: over and over, the reader is told how bad her condition is, how bad her headaches and sickness is, and it can become somewhat annoying. Because I think it’s enough if you get introduced to a problem ONCE, it doesn’t need to be slapped into your face over and over again. She’s sick, she suffers, WE GET IT.

The reason I read this book in such a short amount of time was that as soon as I knew something was off about Cady’s “accident”, I was dying to know what it was; I am just that sort of very curious person. Plus, the love story between her and Gat becomes even more complicated, and although they seem to fall back into what they were two summers ago, they’re not really back to where they’ve left off, if that makes any sense at all. Gat behaves oddly enough to cause a distance between them that Cady desperately tries to overcome. The more clues the reader gets throughout the part of the book (after the accident) – little hints by her aunt Carrie’s strange behaviour at night, her cousin’s nightmares and slip of tongue once,  her hovering mother, – the more curious he/she gets. At least that’s what happened to me.

And just when you think that you have found out what happened, when it seems crystal clear and you start thinking “That’s it? That’s the huge mystery?”, E. Lockhart presents the shocking truth. Which, I have to admit, hit me right in the stomach, because I did not expect it. And although the reader is a bit…left out in the open about how, after Cady comes back to the island two years after the “accident”, things worked out with the “Liars”, without further explanations (not going into details about these “explanations”, as I don’t want to give away anything; people who might read this will understand once they read the book themselves), I, personally, felt content with the ending. I still felt that there was a closure for me to all the secrets, the strange behaviours, the gaps that opened up between Cady, her family and especially the “Liars”, whom she spent every single summer with, being as close as you can be with friends. I didn’t need any more descriptions. And the fact that I read this book without any expectations, as so many others did, helped me to not being disappointed by the ending. Because in my opinion, there really is NOTHING to be disappointed about.

The book shows the abysses of a very patriarchic family, driven by love, envy, lies, racism, money and expectations that all seem to lose their meaning as soon everybody is confronted with a shocking incident. All that matters then is to stick together and keep what’s left of that family together as good as possible – no matter the consequences.

Blood is thicker than water. And apparently, a family tree is stronger than even the most shocking events.