I received this book for free from Random House of Canada in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
Published by Delacorte Press Genres: Contemporary, Mystery, YA
Source: Random House of Canada
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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 National Book Award finalist and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart.
Read it.
And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.
We Were Liars is an incredible, heartbreaking read that really messes with your mind until the very end. The writing, while not for everyone I’m sure, had me mesmerized. It’s so different and poetic and full of carefully crafted imagery. It’s a writing style that’s really out of the box, you’ll either love it or hate it. Me, I was thoroughly compelled.
The plot itself is one you can’t talk about or read about as you’re bound to find out spoilers. It’s the kind of story where the story itself is a spoiler from very early on. There are hints floating in every corner, pieces of this carefully constructed puzzle laid out for you to put together. My advice: go into this with zero expectations and you might find yourself as enthralled as I was! Although it’s a twist I have seen before in different variations (and thus I wasn’t completely caught off guard by the ending), it never fails to give me goosebumps and sting at my poor heart.
The cast is large, and the dark, twisted fairy-tale-like quality is ever-present inside this tale revolving around greed, power, and material things. This tone is maintained with actual short fairy-tale retellings scattered throughout that bore an eerie resemblance to the present story. It did take me a bit to get all the characters and different disaccords in order – the cryptic, mind-boggly nature of this plot and writing makes it hard to make sense of what’s being conveyed at times, but this is clearly purposeful and I ended up impressed by its cleverness.
But anyways, this review has to stay short because, la la la – no spoilers – it’s that kind of read. Plus the blurb told me to lie, so maybe this review is full of crock and this book is just a bunch of dancing elephants. In any case – 4 stars all the way!
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