Review: We Were Liars
"It is good to be loved, even though it will not last."
We Were Liars
E. Lockhart
227 pages - 2014 - fiction, mystery
March 3rd, 2025
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐½
I’ve talked a few times on here about my family vacations. I was lucky enough to have an enormous and extremely caring family—my dad has ten siblings, almost all of whom are married with children, and we all get along (nearly) all the time. My two brothers and I are the youngest of the first generation of cousins, so we have the privilege of watching the next generation starting to come into being and grow into people.
We would often rent lake houses, usually in upstate New York, and cram as many family members as possible in them. We had a game called “hamster” where we would lay on various surfaces—beds, couches, rugs, each other—and watch movies and sleep. The lake houses were always lovely, and the views were gorgeous, but what I loved most about the vacations was the people.
This book felt like if my family vacations had happened in an opposite universe. The family is fragmented and distant; they spend vacations on an island, each family unit staying in a separate house. There is too much room and too many secrets.
The story is about Cadence Sinclair, now seventeen years old, who had had an accident during one summer when she was fifteen. She had hit her head, somehow, and sustained head trauma, migraines, and amnesia. The book focuses on her piecing together the mystery of not only her accident, but the tensions surrounding it, both before and after.
The family is buttoned-up about everything, as we see from the very start. They do not talk about their feelings or their difficulties. Cady’s father cheated on her mother and left them; he is never mentioned. Cady’s grandmother died, and it is as though she never existed at all. Cady, despite asking for answers, does not receive them for far too long.
The title of the book comes from Cady’s group of cousins, who called themselves the Liars. They were the closest in age, Cady being the oldest, followed three weeks after by Johnny, then Mirren a little while after him. The fourth in the group was Gat, an Indian-American boy who was Johnny’s friend and became a mainstay on the island, though he was still viewed as an outsider by the older folks.
And the older folks have their share of issues and grief. Cady’s mother fights with her sisters over inheritance, over land, over seemingly nothing at all. Through the summer, Cady tries desperately to search for answers without angering the grown-ups, knowing that she’ll be whisked away off the island if she does so and will never learn the truth.
I read the book in a single day, partially because I had been so busy lately and finally had some time to sit and read. It was not very long, and it was not too complex, plus I liked the mystery and wanted to see it solved. This weekend I had gone to a variety of bookstores and little libraries, so I was really itching for a book, and this scratched that itch quite nicely.
Summary (Spoilers!)
Cadence is almost eighteen, the oldest of the cousins within the Sinclair family. Harris and Tipper, the grandparents, were quite wealthy and are well-known within the Boston area. They bought the private island near Martha’s Vineyard and built houses for their children—Bess, Cassie, and Penny—as well as a house for themselves.
Cadence and her cousins call themselves the Liars, as well as her cousin Johnny’s friend Gat. Gat’s uncle is a longtime partner of Johnny’s mother and Cady’s aunt Carrie; they have been dating for over nine years at the time of the story. However, we learn that the family, particularly Harris, is racist towards them, Gat and his uncle being Indian; Harris has said that if Carrie marries Ed, Gat’s uncle, he will disinherit her and she will not be allowed back on the island.
Still, though, Gat comes back to the island during the summers, and Cady falls deeply in love with him, the way that you only really can at fifteen. He reciprocates the love, too, although it is idyllic in the way that a summer fling in such an isolated location can be.
However, during “summer fifteen”, when Cady was fifteen, she sustained injuries that left her with debilitating migraines and selective amnesia. She does not remember what happened that summer, leading up to or right after her accident, and the family refuses to talk about it anymore. During her recovery, her father had taken her on a trip to Europe, and she often wrote emails to the Liars, but she never heard back.
Harris, the grandfather, is also starting to rapidly age and deteriorate. He calls Cady by the wrong name during summer seventeen, the present day of this book, and can’t remember many details. The aunts fight more and more over inheritance, having lost their mother a few years prior.
The old house that had been Harris and Tipper’s has been rebuilt before summer seventeen, to Cady’s shock and dismay. Her family greets her and welcomes her back to the island, but it’s quite awkward; her reunion with the Liars is much more comfortable, even despite their silence for the last few years.
Cady slowly remembers what happened two years ago. Harris had asked pointed questions of the cousins to figure out inheritance and money, manipulating his daughters into fighting with each other relentlessly.
The fighting grated on the children until they decided to do something about it—Cady finally remembers that the Liars had made up their minds to start a fire in Harris and Tipper’s house, just to show the adults that they were being ridiculous with all their bickering. The adults’ fighting had reached a point where they no longer wanted to be on the same island together, so they left the kids behind; during their night alone, they started a fire.
Cady realizes that two of the family dogs had died in the fire, Harris and Tipper’s dogs, whom she had loved dearly. She grieves them immensely. The Liars try to comfort her, but she realizes that there is even more that she does not know.
Finally, Cady realizes that it was not just the dogs that died that night, but the other three Liars. Johnny, Mirren, and Gat had been trapped upstairs when Cady had lit the first match. They had spent the summer there as ghosts, holding on to Cady’s consciousness, but it was becoming too difficult for them to stay. Cady learns that Mirren was not just sick; she was fighting to hold on to this world before moving on.
Cady says goodbye to the Liars, and they walk off into the ocean, finally moving on.
Summertime Sadness
I enjoyed the process of reading this book, but I’m not sure it resonated with me very much. Personally I love a ghost story, and I love a story with clues leading to a reveal like the one in this book, but I did not feel that there was enough evidence for it to stand on. It felt cheap, in my opinion, that the kids had been dead the whole time.
That being said, though, it was an emotional read. Cady saying goodbye to her best friends on the beach, after suffering so thoroughly for years without even realizing why, is tough and heartbreaking. So is her having to cope with the fact that she is the reason three people and two dogs are dead.
Overall, the book made me glad that my family is the way that they are. A few of my cousins and one of my brothers came to visit me this weekend, and there was no drama whatsoever, just laughter and love; in my memory, family vacations were no different, just week-long parties and joy. This book reminds me that I got incredibly lucky. Obviously not every family has vacations that end in arson, but even the squabbling between aunts was overwhelming.
I’m glad I read it, and I am interested to see if reading it again lends itself to a different experience. In hindsight, it’s easy to notice the fact that the adults never talk to the other Liars, or that they seem to appear and disappear instead of entering and exiting. But I’m sure there were other little details I missed.
As a whole, I missed reading. Maybe this book wasn’t the deepest, but it scratched the perfect itch in my brain. It was entertaining and a bit poignant, and it made me reflect even more on how awesome my family really is.
Total pages read so far, 2025: 2,803
Total books read so far, 2025: 9
Next book: Dinosaurs Without Bones by Anthony J. Martin