Review » We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

About the Book

We Were Liars

by E. Lockhart

A beautiful and distinguished family.
A private island.
A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.
A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive.
A revolution. An accident. A secret.
Lies upon lies.
True love.
The truth.


We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from New York Times bestselling author, National Book Award finalist, and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart.

Read it.

And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.

I received an ARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I'm not talking about fate. I don't believe in destiny or soul mates or the supernatural or any of that stuff. I just mean we understood each other. All the way.

Holy moly, I can't even think right now. This book broke me. I wasn't expecting that at all. To be honest, for a while throughout reading, it got to be slow in some areas for me and I wasn't sure if I wanted to finish reading it at the moment. I thought about putting it down and picking up another one and trying again some other time. I can't believe I had even considered it. I'm broken. I'm hollow. I'm a mess now.

Cady Sinclair Eastman has spent every summer on her family's privately owned island. Her oldest cousins Johnny, Mirren and Johnny's step-cousin Gat were her closest friends and together, they called themselves the Liars. For the Liars, their time on the island was a place of magic and wonder, their heaven on earth. They loved their time there and looked forward to it every year, even when things were going wrong. But the summer after their grandmother died, everything went wrong. Cady had an accident which left her with severe memory loss and crippling headaches. The summer after her accident, she is sent to Europe with her dad and Cady couldn't understand why after so long, the Liars never called her, never emailed her back. Never took the time to make sure she was okay. But the summer after that, she returns to the island to find them there, waiting for her along with everyone else. And it is that summer that the memories begin to resurface. She begins to remember what happened that fateful summer. The summer that everything went wrong.

E. Lockhart has woven such a delicate, complicated, heart-wrenching, beautiful story. After my bout of stupidity in which I thought about putting the book away, I buckled down and finished. It didn't take me long either. After halfway through the book, Cady's memories start rushing back. Up until that point, she was lost and confused, with migraines keeping her in bed sick most days. She couldn't understand why no one would just tell her what happened, and she begins to get frustrated. But once the memories return, theirs no stopping the emotions from boiling over. It's not very often that I start to cry while reading a book, but once the truth finally came out, once Cady remembered what happened the summer of her accident, the tears came. I applaud E. Lockhart in her ability to make me cry, even though I desperately wanted for her to say "no wait! It's all a horrible joke. This isn't what really happens. Here let me tell you the truth." But that never came and so now I'm left with tears on my face and an ache in my heart and wondering why it took me so long to finally read this book and also why I torture myself by reading stories that break me.