Review Detail

We Were Liars will take you on a twisty journey to truth. Our main character, Cadence, has had a traumatic experience, but she can’t remember what happened and has crippling migraines frequently. I listened to the audiobook for a portion of the story, and the narrator nails the hazy, drug-fogged musings of the characters as she contemplates how perfect the Sinclair family has always tried to be and who she is now and who she once was.
Every summer, the family goes to their private island and lives the life of the fabulously rich and careless. Cady adores her cousins Mirren and Johnny. Johnny’s mother loves a man from India, but doesn’t dare marry him, or she will lose her inheritance. She daringly brings her lover’s nephew, Gat, each summer from the time he was eight. By 15, Cady loves him fiercely and obsessively, and receives veiled comments from her grandfather. Gat tries to make her understand his rage and the impotence he feels dealing with her grandpa’s understated racism.
Wow, this story packs a punch of a plot twist. As Cady flashes back to the summer she was 15, we are given clues but never expect the big reveal. He grandfather is ultrarich, and her mother and 2 aunts have lived a life of privilege, never making much of themselves. This gives her grandfather enormous control, and the claws come out once their grandmother dies over who will inherit which portion. It takes a while for the reader to understand how important this theme is.
Full of mystery and suspense, we come ever closer to the truth bomb as Cady remembers more and starts to process. Once you know the truth, it makes you want to immediately reread, to see the story from her family’s perspective. It makes me wonder what the family must have thought when she returned to the island at 17 that summer.
This book has great potential for discussion on wealth, power, overt and subtle racism, mental health, and family. Once you know the truth, it is hard to come to terms with how irrevocable it is. Fans of We Were Kings by Court Stevens and Ginny Myers Sain’s Secrets So Deep should put this on their TBR asap! They have just adapted the series for TV, and I know what my next binge watch will be.