44.4k reviews for:

We Were Liars

E. Lockhart

3.57 AVERAGE


“We are liars. We are beautiful and privileged. We are cracked and broken.”

une histoire qui met (trop) du temps à se mettre en place, une chute qui fait sens mais ne retourne pas pour autant. on voit la chose venir doucement.
les expressions et métaphores utilisées sont sympas. mais cette façon de revenir à la ligne en permanence ? ugh—
on m’avait vendu une réelle folie littéraire : grande déception.
emotional mysterious reflective relaxing tense fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated
dark emotional fast-paced
dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

predictable and 80% boring
hate the writing style

Oooooooookay. This book wasn’t on my radar until Jamie from The Perpetual Page-turner absolutely raved about it on Twitter. Then the positive reviews came flooding in, all boasting of a mind-blowing thriller with an ending the reader will never see coming.

So of course I needed to read it. I love a twist ending. But you know what? I was disappointed.

I liked the first 60% of this novel, albeit it was a little hard to care about the characters. We Were Liars centers around the influential and well-off Sinclair family. They’re your typical rich, white New England liberals so steeped in privilege it’s practically oozing from their ears. I’m not saying that people like this have invariably easy lives or that they live with no hardships – I just mean that it’s kind of hard to care about them when the adults are fighting over the family patriarch’s estate and the grandmother buys illegal ivory.

The writing was also kind of vague and distant. It was hard to get a read on any emotions from any character except for the main character, Cady, since it was a first-person narrative. I’m sure that some of this had to do with the way the Sinclairs are taught to always be “normal,” to hide their feelings, and to never cause a scene. And I get that. But a lot of this detachment was also because of the simplistic sentences and dreamlike structure of the entire thing.

Now, around the 2/3 mark, I figured out what the twist ending was. I don’t know if that’s because it was simply written or if it was because I’ve read a TON of books with this particular device. But the clues were there, sprinkled within the text the entire time and I thought it was kind of obvious. However, this is definitely worth a reread and will be interesting to see how everything pans out, knowing how it ends.

So I wasn’t all that impressed with We Were Liars. That’s somewhat because I’ve seen all this before just because of the books I like to read (i.e., psychological thrillers.) It could also be because of the hype surrounding this. Seriously, I can only think of one person who actually disliked it. I recommend giving it a read though – it’s definitely worth it, and it’s just short enough to not be a total time-waster even if you don’t like it. I’m not sure what I should rate this; my feelings about it were all over the place. So I’m just going to go with a neutral rating. I didn’t dislike it, but it wasn’t everything I hoped it would be.
dark mysterious tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Entendí lo que la autora quiso hacer pero descubrí muy pronto lo que ocurría. En ciertos puntos dejó de transmitirme emoción.
Supe muy bien que Gat moriría pero no pensé que el resto también, tampoco esperé que Cadence fuera la "mente maestra" detrás del incendio
dark mysterious fast-paced
emotional mysterious medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated