We Were Liars by E. Lockhart Review

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
Release Date: May 13, 2014
Publisher: Delacorte Press; 240 pages
Rating:

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.

So here's the thing.  The absolute worst thing that I can do when reading a book is to go into it with expectations.  So I always try to go into it open minded.  There have been too many books that I've ended up disappointed in because of them being over-hyped.  Now try as I might, I tried to go into We Were Liars without an opinion.  But unfortunately I kept reading really good reviews.  It also doesn't help that the back cover over hypes the ending.  I remember when the movie the Sixth Sense hit theaters years ago, and every theater goer was raving about the ending.  Now I am not going to spoil it in case for some of you may not actually seen this movie.  But the ending of that movie is really shocking.  And it's also really unpredictable.  Now I probably am in the very minority with this opinion, but I thought the ending of We Were Liars was just okay.

We Were Liars tells the story of Cadence (Cady) Sinclair.  Cady was born into a wealthy family.  And every summer Cady along with her extended family vacation on a private island.  Now I was immediately intrigued.  Call  me shallow, but I love reading about the wealthy.  Their lives are always ridiculously dramatic and filled with scandal.  This book definitely didn't disappoint on that end.  There was plenty of backstabbing and backbiting.  

I want to make it clear that in no way do I think this book is bad.  And honestly I love the storytelling in it.  I liked being in Cady's head.  She brought something special to the story.  It is written really beautifully.  I will probably go back and re read it.  In fact, I almost did re read it before writing this review.  But I thought it would be wrong to not base my review on my first impression.  I think that overall it will definitely benefit from being read twice.  My favorite parts were the stories featuring the princesses.  There is so much symbolism in the tales within the story that it makes it quite genius.

The reason why I am highly critical of the ending is because there is so much emphasis on it.  It's like going to an ice cream parlor and having amazing toppings, but have really bland ice cream.  Overall the suspense and build up of the novel is really really good.  If you're a fan of mysteries, I would definitely recommend it.  Especially since at under 250 pages, the story is not drawn out.  And it is a quick and easy read.