The Liars - A Review

What’s to like: Just how invincible one feels in youth, and how reality always comes crashing down

Now that it’s been a good amount of time since the books and the series came out, I think it is the right time to talk about two books together — We Were Liars and Family of Liars.

We Were Liars is from the perspective of Cadence Sinclair, daughter of Penny Sinclair and the eldest granddaughter in the all-American, perfect family of Sinclairs. We see through her eyes the events of Summer 17 (she is 17 years old), where she has been the victim of severe trauma, causing a head injury two summers ago, when she was found at the seashore. She doesn’t remember anything about the incident that is the cause of her headaches, which make her feel numb with pain and confusion. She returns to her family beach, Beechwood, missing the Liars and her summers there with them — her cousins Johnny and Mirren, and Gat, the nephew of one of her aunts’ partners, whom she has been in love with since Summer 8, which is the first time they met.

While she tries to find out why her grandpa built a new house, why none of the Liars tried to keep in touch with her over the two summers, and why all the aunts don’t hate each other anymore, she gets flashes of her memories back. She tries to find out, with the help of the rest of the Liars, what happened in Summer 15 — who hurt her and why. We flit through her past summers on Beechwood, understanding the nuances and personalities of all the characters, learning about her grandma Tipper’s death and how it affected her grandpa Harris, a controlling, well-to-do man, trying to get his way and manipulating his daughters into proving themselves worthy of his wealth.

She describes Johnny, the elder son of Aunt Carrie, who was so full of life — seemingly unserious, but committed to everything and everyone he loves. She describes Mirren, the eldest daughter of Aunt Bess, who is sugar and spice, sharp-tongued, but who instantly regrets anything mean she says because she tends to be irritable. She describes Gat — her Gat — who is self-aware and ambitious, and always pushes everyone around him to be better and open their eyes to injustices happening all the time. Cadence’s memories slowly start to come back to her during Summer 17, and what she finally pieces together is something that I really did not expect in my wildest dreams the first time I read this book.

Family of Liars is a prequel to We Were Liars, told from the perspective of Carrie Sinclair, the eldest daughter of Harris and Tipper Sinclair, who is explaining to her son Johnny, what the worst thing she has ever done is. While in We Were Liars, we see all the characters from the perspective of a kid — someone who doesn’t have a full background of the dynamics in this family — Carrie explains it all. She ends up showing how invincible Harris seems, yet makes his motives plausible as he attempts to protect his family.

We learn of another Sinclair sister who died very young at the beach by drowning. This book shows how grief changes people, and how people born and brought up in the same family deal with situations in different ways. As she explains her own Summer 17, when her cousin brings her boyfriend and his friends along for the summer, we hear about their adolescence and the worst thing that she (or, to be specific, they) has done. This family has been holding onto many secrets, only because they have the power and resources to do so.

When I initially started reading these books, I hoped to read a thrilling mystery, and while it fulfils that, it made me fall in love with the half-prose and half-poetry form of writing that E. Lockhart uses — how, in the middle of a sentence, the protagonist switches into a metaphorical (yet highly dramatic and hyperbolical) poetic explanation of the situation, similar to how a teenager would truly think. The presentation of a highly dysfunctional family, but through the lens of stories from Grimm’s fairy tales that explain what is going to happen next, adds a touch of mysticism and fantasy to it all.

The language is simple yet descriptive enough to take you to Beechwood in your mind, the imagery quite clear, especially with the help of the map at the beginning of the book. The presence of inherent racism, along with the power of privilege and the subtle, entangled, always-make-your-stakes-higher fight amongst the mothers, is prominent. This shows how it affects the kids psychologically, pressurizing them to choose between what they care most for and what they can do for their futures. I truly love every single character, as they all are so complex yet so human in their portrayal. Can’t wait for the next instalment in this series!

Favourite line: “We are liars. We are beautiful and privileged. We are cracked and broken.”