Synopsis:

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.

Review:

I remember We Were Liars coming out and it’s crazy to think it’s now almost 10 years old. It’s even crazier to think it’s taken me this long to read it. I’m not regretting waiting that long though, this wasn’t as good as I had expected.

The plot moves very slowly and while I don’t always hate that, there just wasn’t much happening. Not until the very end and by then I was pretty much over the whole book. 

I really didn’t like Cadence. Her whole ‘woe be me, I’m a sad little rich girl who has the worst life ever’ bit was very annoying. Yes, rich people can have problems, of course they can, but she complained about going on a summer trip around Europe. Most people would kill for that.

I did like the other ‘liars’ though. They were very interesting characters and they didn’t call their mom ‘mommy’ constantly (unlike Cadence), so that was a win. The whole family dynamic was very strange but I liked the intricacies of it.

My favourite parts of We Were Liars was definitely the ‘fairy tales’ in between sections. They had really great foreshadowing and they broke up the snail’s pace of the rest of the book. They also gave character development of the parents that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. The breaking down of relationships and the slow crumble of the great Sinclair family were portrayed really well with these.

I’m not going to give any spoilers but I actually guessed the ending – not the entire twist but I did get the biggest one. I was quite impressed with myself. This really brought the story together and actually saved it from a bad rating. 

It sounds like I hated We Were Liars, but I didn’t. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but it was pretty decent. For a long time, I didn’t really care for what was happening and I was thinking about DNF’ing it. However, I pushed through and actually quite enjoyed it in the end – not enough to give it a high rating, but I think three stars are very fair.

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