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Summary
Summary
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A modern, sophisticated suspense novel from National Book Award finalist, and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart. Don't miss the #1 New York Times bestselling prequel, Family of Liars.
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.
Read it.
And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.
"Thrilling, beautiful, and blisteringly smart, We Were Liars is utterly unforgettable." --John Green, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars
Author Notes
E. Lockhart is the author of We Were Liars, Fly on the Wall, Dramarama, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks and the Ruby Oliver quartet: The Boyfriend List, The Boy Book, The Treasure Map of Boys, and Real Live Boyfriends. She also co-authored How to Be Bad with Lauren Myracle and Sarah Mlynowski.
Lockhart's Disreputable History was a Printz Award honor book, a finalist for the National Book Award, and recipient of the Cybils Award for best young adult novel.
Lockhart has a doctorate in English literature from Columbia University and currently teaches creative writing at Hamline University's MFA program in Writing for Children. In 2015 the title We Were Liars made the Silver Inky Awards shortlist.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this noir YA drama, three privileged cousins and a friend meet each summer on a private island, where they confront first love and staggering losses. Reader Meyers does an excellent job with the main character, Cadence, whose dialogue requires the full range of emotions. At the beginning of the story, Cadence seems like a typical sullen teenager trying to find her place in the world and wondering why her boyfriend doesn't write back to her. As the story continues and grows darker, however, she pieces together her spotty memories of an on-island accident that wrecked her health and distanced her from the family, a whole cast of characters that Meyers also voices. These characters include Cadence's snobby mother and her two shrill, money-grubbing sisters, who spend the bulk of their summers trying to wheedle themselves into their father's good graces and substantial inheritance. Where the narration falls short is with the grandfather, who gets a voice that is stereotypically gruff and shaggy, even in his rare tender moments. Ages 12-up. A Delacorte hardcover. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
After a two-year absence due to an accident she can't remember, seventeen-year-old Cady Sinclair Eastman returns to the private island where the beautiful, entitled Sinclair clan spends its summers. Relationships (particularly among Cady, her same-age cousins Johnny and Mirren, and family friend Gat; and among her mother and aunts) feel oddly strained, and no one will tell Cady what happened the summer of the accident. The pieces of her fragmented memory slowly come together to reveal a truth more devastating than Cady (or the listener) could have imagined. Meyers gives the first-person narrative a vulnerability perfectly suited to damaged, self-deluded Cady while also, in flashbacks, evoking the carefree days of previous summers. This novel's shocking denouement hits hard -- and even more so when related with Meyers's disbelieving, heartbroken delivery. katie bircher (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Cadence Sinclair Eastman is the oldest grandchild of a preeminent family. The Sinclairs have the height, the blondness, and the money to distinguish them, as well as a private island off the coast of Massachusetts called Beechwood. Harris, the family patriarch, has three daughters: Bess, Carrie, and Penny, who is Cadence's mother. And then there is the next generation, the Liars : Cadence; Johnny, the first grandson; Mirren, sweet and curious; and outsider Gat, an Indian boy and the nephew of Carrie's boyfriend. Cadence, Johnny, Mirren, and Gat are a unit, especially during summer 15, the phrase they use to mark their fifteenth year on Beechwood the summer that Cady and Gat fall in love. When Lockhart's mysterious, haunting novel opens, readers learn that Cady, during this summer, has been involved in a mysterious accident, in which she sustained a blow to the head, and now suffers from debilitating migraines and memory loss. She doesn't return to Beechwood until summer 17, when she recovers snippets of memory, and secrets and lies as well as issues of guilt and blame, love and truth all come into play. Throughout the narrative, Lockhart weaves in additional fairy tales, mostly about three beautiful daughters, a king, and misfortune. Surprising, thrilling, and beautifully executed in spare, precise, and lyrical prose, Lockhart spins a tragic family drama, the roots of which go back generations. And the ending? Shhhh. Not telling. (But it's a doozy). HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Lockhart's latest is unlike anything she's done before. With a Printz Honor to back her, plus a major marketing campaign and a promotional quote from John Green this is poised to be big.--Kelley, Ann Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A PATRICIAN New England clan decamps to their private island off Martha's Vineyard for the summer. Of the dozen or so Sinclair family members in residence, "No one is a criminal. No one is an addict. No one is a failure." Three lies, the first of many, provide an irresistible premise for this ticking bomb of a novel by E. Lockhart. All the Sinclairs are rich, athletic and beautiful. They have servants, money and stiff upper lips. They go to the right schools, play excellent tennis and are as brittle as porcelain, ready to shatter into a million pieces under the strain of rivalry, silence and greed. Overtones of the Brothers Grimm and "King Lear" abound in this quasi-fable about the powerful patriarch and his three beautiful, useless daughters, all of whom drink too much and feud over who will get the biggest slice of the family fortune. Meanwhile the next generation - Lear's grandchildren, as it were - raises the moral ante by falling inappropriately in love, fomenting revolution and refusing to participate in the traditional Sinclair game of vying for granddad's money. The liars of the title are three teenage cousins - Johnny, Mirren and our narrator, Cadence - together with an outsider by the name of Gat Patil. Gat is handsome, dark-skinned and charismatic, with passionately held political beliefs such as: "Not everyone has private islands. Some people work on them. Some work in factories. Some don't have work. Some don't have food." Cadence's grandfather cannot even bring himself to address the interloper by name, but for Cadence it is love at first sight. While the Sinclair mothers bicker over tablecloths, earrings and trust funds, the liars dream of college and freedom and true love. Lockhart admirably captures the erotic intensity of shadowy summer nights when the grown-ups either are drunk or elsewhere, or both, leaving the liars - tanned and barefoot and desperate for intimacy - to kiss and shiver and swear eternal allegiance on the beach. Years pass; the troubles in paradise intensify. Money is tight. Drinkers become drunks. Sexual jealousies surface. And then, during the summer of her 15 th year, Cadence suffers a catastrophic accident that leaves her with crippling migraines and total amnesia. But what actually happened? Was it really just an accident? Amnesia is not an easy literary row to hoe. Beloved by cheap TV drama, it's a device certain to cue groans and eye-rolls from jaded readers. Yet Lockhart just about manages to pull it off, thanks to the freshness of the writing and the razor-sharp metaphor amnesia provides for the Sinclair family habit of denial. Cadence returns to the island after two years to try to reconstruct what happened on the night of the accident. For reasons that frustrate her (and the reader), but which will eventually be explained, not a single witness will talk. The story jumps back and forth in time, interspersing her edgy, idiomatic narrative with a series of powerful twisted fairy tales. Slowly, painstakingly, Cadence pieces together the events of that terrible night. Despite a final chapter that hints at redemption, it is not the sort of disaster from which she will ever recover. I enjoyed Lockhart's pithy observations, the intimate shorthand, the snappy characterizations of WASP families. They populated my youth on Martha's Vineyard and at Harvard, flawlessly confident, angst-free and clean in their Izod shirts and Lily Pulitzer dresses, inspiring curiosity and wonder in generations of messy, overemotional Jews. Who are they? What are they really like? The flaw in "We Were Liars" is that we never find out. Cadence's story emerges from deep within this troubled family - and yet the aunts, teenagers, littles and golden retrievers form a largely undifferentiated mass. Careless, grasping and obsessed with keeping up appearances, they casually wreck one another's lives, but we never discover why. Even the liars are a featureless bunch. Cadence repeatedly announces that Johnny is "bounce, effort and snark," that Mirren is "sugar, curiosity and rain," that Gat is "contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee." These are nice descriptions, but some genuine characterization wouldn't go amiss. Their fates seem as distant as the fates of the princesses in Cadence's fairy tales. They are there to offer a moral, not to elicit sympathy or understanding. This is an ambitious novel with an engaging voice, a clever plot and some terrific writing. In the end, however, its portrayal of a shattered family and the desperate consequences of silence and greed, feels oddly flat. I couldn't help thinking that the terrible fate of the Sinclair family might as well be happening to a collection of fairy tale characters. Or to those preppy models in the Ralph Lauren ads. Did I care how they lived or died? Probably not as much as I should have. MEG ROSOFF is the author of "How I Live Now," the 2005 winner of the Michael L. Printz Award, and, most recently, of "Picture Me Gone," a 2013 National Book Award finalist.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 7 Up-Cadence Sinclair Easton has spent all of her summers on her family's private island, Beechwood, with three generations of family, including her cousins Johnny and Mirren, and a family friend, Gat, an Indian boy. The novel begins during what Cadence and her peers label "summer 15." They refer to themselves as "the liars" and enjoy the typical teen activities, according to Cadence, who narrates. But during summer 15, two important events occur at Beechwood. Cadence and Gat fall in love and Cadence suffers an accident that causes her severe migraine headaches and loss of memory. This accident eventually causes Cadence to stay away from Beechwood and her cousins for a year while she recuperates. It becomes clear as Cadence tells her story that she is emotionally fragile and unreliable, and that she has moments where she remembers secrets and lies. Ariadne Meyers performs here and does an excellent job of portraying the troubled teen. Listeners will definitely be able to absorb the essence of Cadence's mental anguish as well as the emotions of each of the various characters in this multigenerational family drama. Fans of Gillian Flynn will probably want to add this to their list of must-reads. The story saves its biggest punch for the end, and listeners will not see the twist coming.-Sheila Acosta, San Antonio Public Library, TX (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
"June of the summer I was 15, my father ran off with some woman he loved more than us." Cadence Sinclair, the teenage narrator of We Were Liars, initially seems very familiar: quirky, sentimental and charming, blessed with a neat turn of phrase, surely she's going to lead us on a tale of unrequited love studded with witty one-liners. And indeed she does, but her story soon descends into murkier waters, eyeing its teenage protagonist with a twisted smile and a tragic sense of the pain wrought by selfish adolescents. The American writer Emily Jenkins writes picture books and for adults under her own name, and YA novels as E Lockhart. I'd only read one of them, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, the tale of a feisty teenage girl at a prestigious boarding school who refuses to play by the rules. It's adorably warm and funny, and I was expecting more of the same, but We Were Liars is quite different: cool, bitter and brutal, this compelling short novel casts a dispassionate eye on the insular world of the American oligarchy. Cadence is the eldest granddaughter of a family so rich that they never mention money. Every year, the Sinclairs spend their summer on a private island, where the grandparents have built four houses for themselves and their three daughters, plus a smaller building for their cooks and cleaners. The Sinclairs are beset by deaths, addictions and the tragedies that afflict all families, however privileged, but they tuck them away behind their strong chins and perfect smiles. Cadence makes a tight little group with the two grandchildren her own age, Johnny and Mirren, and an outsider, Gat, who joins them every year. Aged 15, Cadence falls in love with Gat. At the end of that summer, she has an accident, a breakdown or some kind of illness, but she can't remember what happened, how or why. All she knows is that she was found on the shore, dressed in her underwear, the sea washing over her. "They tested me for brain tumours, meningitis, you name it. To relieve the pain they prescribed this drug and that drug and another drug, because the first one didn't work and the second one didn't work, either." That was two summers ago. Now she is returning to the island, to her family, her grandfather, aunts and cousins, and Gat. Pills cloud her judgment. Migraines confine her to bed for days. Cadence narrates the novel, but she doesn't use the polite style that you'd expect from such an educated aristocrat. The prose is fractured, disordered, messy. This is the voice of a girl who has been broken and is trying to put the pieces back together. Quizzing those around her, Cadence searches for a solution, an explanation. "I suppose that I was raped or attacked or some godforsaken something. That's the kind of thing that makes people have amnesia, isn't it?" The reader searches with her, combing for clues in the family's behaviour, the lies and omissions of a tight-knit patrician clan. When the secret at the heart of the book is finally revealed, it turns out to be nastier and more shocking than anything I had imagined. This is a cunning, clever and absolutely gripping novel, full of surprises, which sent me straight back to its first page as soon as I reached the last. Josh Lacey's The Dragonsitter is published by Andersen. To order We Were Liars for pounds 6.39 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Josh Lacey Cadence makes a tight little group with the two grandchildren her own age, Johnny and Mirren, and an outsider, Gat, who joins them every year. Aged 15, Cadence falls in love with Gat. At the end of that summer, she has an accident, a breakdown or some kind of illness, but she can't remember what happened, how or why. All she knows is that she was found on the shore, dressed in her underwear, the sea washing over her. "They tested me for brain tumours, meningitis, you name it. To relieve the pain they prescribed this drug and that drug and another drug, because the first one didn't work and the second one didn't work, either." Quizzing those around her, Cadence searches for a solution, an explanation. "I suppose that I was raped or attacked or some godforsaken something. That's the kind of thing that makes people have amnesia, isn't it?" The reader searches with her, combing for clues in the family's behaviour, the lies and omissions of a tight-knit patrician clan. - Josh Lacey.