We Were Liars by E. Lockhart : Book Review

Title: We Were Liars
Author: E. Lockhart
Publisher:  Delacorte Press  
Published Date: May 13th 2014
Genre: YA, Realistic Fiction, Mystery, Contemporary, Family
Page Count: 227 pages
Format: Hardcover

My Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

Goodreads Summary: 
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.

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 My Review:

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

I put off reading this book, for a year because of how much hype it had gotten last year, and with hyped books they can either be hit or big misses. This one was kind of a hit for me, but not as big as I wanted it to be.

Cady and her cousins and Gat (Cousins kind of step cousin) are heirs to a distinguished family whose grandfather is obsessed with stock and appearances. This also leads to the children’s mother trying to show off to grandfather how good they are in order to be the one who get everything when he passes away. None of them care about that/or want that though so they don’t do it unless the mothers are around. All they want to do instead is spend the summer together on the island in their own world.

You don’t start noticing that something isn’t quite right though until Cady is finally allowed to run to the summer island and starts having memories of what happened, plus things are just weird in general. Not only will no one tell her what happened, the cousins are different as well.  This is when the plot twists and you start putting all of the pieces together.  

“Be sad, be sorry-but don't shoulder it.”

For the first part of this book I didn’t really understand what had happened, and I just found it all to be rather confusing.  It didn’t really start to make since and hold my attention until about the middle of the second part, when we start to see what had happened that summer 15 and why everything had changed since.  I know everyone says this and I was hoping I would have to as well, but you truly can’t tell much about this book without spoiling it and ruining the whole story. I’m sorry. If you like mystery books that suck you in after the first hundred pages, and who also has unreliable protagonist then this book will interest you.

“The island is ours. Here, in some way, we are young forever.”

Can I just say this though… what were they thinking in doing what they did in summer of 15? How would that have solved anything?