I can honestly say that I don’t often get the chance to really delve into a book. At least not for my own pleasure. Since coming to college, most of the reading that I do is for a class in some way or another. However, I recently made the discovery of an app called Libby. Libby allows you to connect your library card and virtually check out ebooks and audiobooks without ever having to go to the library in person. This worked out perfectly for me since not only am I about two hours away from my local library, I also can check out an audiobook and have it be read to me while I work on my homework.
All of that being said, I recently checked out the book “We Were Liars” by E. Lockhart. I know I typically stick to reviews for visual stories, but this time I figured I’d try my hand at a book review. I actually had quite a few opinions on this story too, (not that I’m ever without an opinion about anything).
Starting out the story introduces us to our narrator, a young woman named Cadence. Cadence is a member of the wealthy Sinclair family. We find out that the family vacations over on a private island off of Martha’s Vineyard every summer. There, Cadence is reunited with her cousins, and a friend of the family, Johnny, Mirren, and Gat, respectively. The group of young adults affectionately call themselves the liars and spend their summers bonding as they run along the beaches of the island and imagine their futures together.
The story moves further to explore the relationships that the rest of the Sinclair family has and the greed that runs through the family’s veins. This rift in the family causes the liars to want to make a change, but not before a terrible accident can happen, leaving Cadence with daily pain and memory loss. After her accident Cadence goes through a couple of years where she’s unable to go back to the island and see her liars. She misses them terribly and eventually is allowed back to the island for a summer where everything seems completely different, yet somehow the same.
That’s all the background I’ll give on the story because I don’t want to ruin it for anyone. As I was first getting into this story I honestly wasn’t really a fan of it. It really just sounded like a bunch of rich kid problems being told by a whiny rich girl. I gained a little sympathy after the accident when Cadence was suffering from migraines and still having to watch her family fall apart because of greed. But honestly, it seemed pretty dull. I didn’t really get into the book until the last little chunk of it when everything started falling into place. Honestly, that chunk made up for the lull I felt within the rest of the book. If you have the patience or are simply curious to know everything else that happened in the book to make your own opinion I would definitely recommend it.
Overall I give “We Were Liars” a 7/10. It takes a while to get into, but when you start piecing things together it’s actually pretty good.