Not Gonna Lie

The novel I read last quarter was not so great.  It is called We Were Liars and it is written by the Emily Jenkins, who goes by E. Lockhart.  Although the book has several good reviews and is of a mystery genre, the novel's 225 pages were very confusing to me, so I will explain it to the best of my ability.  The main character, Cadence Sinclair Eastman, is apart of a very rich family called "the Liars" because of all the mischief they get into.  She grows up in Burlington, Vermont and in the summer, she goes to the family island called Beechwood where she goes to dinners, plays with her cousins, and lives a very luxurious lifestyle.  Cadence meets Gat there and they fall in love together at the mere age of fourteen, but that is when it goes downhill for them.  Her parents go through a divorce and while, her mother buys basically a new everything to help them get through the transition, Cadence goes through this terrible incident where she experiences memory loss and disabling migraines.  Cadence struggles to come to terms with the extent of her injuries as she tries to figure out what happens throughout the novel while also going through typical losses of innocence through transitioning into adulthood.

We Were Liars has several themes, but one that came to my attention at the end was the perception of reality.  The ending really made me reconsider the details of the novel and made Cadence an unreliable narrator.  There are points in this novel where you really have to question what is real and what is just the perception that goes through Cadence's head.  This novel is one of those where you question "why does that person do such and such.." and it will not make sense until the absolute end.  Personally, this book was not very capturing because of the writing style and the way events played out.  There was no humor or action, it was very old-fashioned mystery.  Lockhart was poetic, made incomplete sentences at times, and had very short chapters.  Overall, the book was not of my preference, so it was not the type that would call my attention or that I would read for hours on end.