We Were Liars (Lockhart)

We Were Liars
E. Lockhart, 2014
Random House Children's
240pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385741262


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. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Aka—Emily Jenkins
• Birth—1967
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Rasied—Cambridge, Washington; Seattle, Washington
• Education—B.A., Vassar College; Ph.D., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in New York City area


Emily Jenkins, who also writes under the name E. Lockhart is a writer of children's picture books, young adult novels, and adult fiction.

Her first novel as E. Lockhart, The Boyfriend List, was published in 2005 and has been followed by three sequels, The Boy Book (2006), The Treasure Map of Boys (2009), and Real Live Boyfriends (2010).These four novels are also known as the Ruby Oliver novels, based on their central protagonist.

Lockhart's 2008 novel, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, was a finalist for both the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the Michael L. Printz Award. Her picture books, written as Emily Jenkins, have won numerous awards, including Boston Globe-Horn Book Award honors and the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Platinum Book Award. Her 2014 novel, We Were Liars, has achieved wide acclaim from reviewers.

Jenkins grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Seattle, Washington. In high school she attended summer drama schools at Northwestern University and the Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis. She attended Lakeside School, a private high school in North Seattle. She went to Vassar College and graduate school at Columbia University. She has a doctorate in English literature. She currently lives in the New York City area. (From Wikipedia and the author's website. Retrieved 2/27/2014.)

Book Reviews
(Starred review.) Cadence Sinclair Eastman, heiress to a fortune her grandfather amassed "doing business I never bothered to understand," is the highly unreliable narrator of this searing story...which begins during her 15th summer when she suffers a head injury on the private island Granddad owns off Cape Cod.... Lockhart has created a mystery with an ending most readers won’t see coming, one so horrific it will prompt some to return immediately to page one to figure out how they missed it. At the center of it is a girl who learns the hardest way of all what family means, and what it means to lose the one that really mattered to you (Ages 12–up).
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) —The story, while lightly touching on issues of class and race, more fully focuses on dysfunctional family drama, a heart-wrenching romance between Cadence and Gat, and, ultimately, the suspense of what happened during that fateful summer. The ending is a stunner that will haunt readers for a long time to come (Gr 9 Up). —Jenny Berggren, formerly at New York Public Library
School Library Journal


(Starred review.) When Lockhart’s mysterious, haunting novel opens, readers learn that Cady, during this summer, has been involved in a mysterious accident.... She doesn’t return to Beechwood until summer 17, when she recovers snippets of memory, and secrets and lies—as well as issues of guilt and blame, love and truth—all come into play.... Surprising, thrilling, and beautifully executed in spare, precise, and lyrical prose, Lockhart spins a tragic family drama (Grades 7-12). —Ann Kelley
Booklist


(Starred review.) [T]his is no sanitized, modern Disney fairy tale; this is Cinderella with her stepsisters' slashed heels in bloody glass slippers. Cady's fairy-tale retellings are dark.... Brilliantly, Lockhart resists simply crucifying the Sinclairs, which might make the family's foreshadowed tragedy predictable or even satisfying.... Riveting, brutal and beautifully told (14 & up).
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Do you trust Cady's narration? Is she lying...or hallucinating?

2. Were the Liars justified in any way to commit the crime they committed?

3. Was the crime successful in any way?

4. Is the Sinclair family acting of their own free will or are they in some way merely moving through patterns established in fairy tales that existed long before them? Consider the author's use of Shakespeare's King Lear and Bronte's Wuthering Heights.

5. Was the ending a surprise...or did you see it coming? Return to earlier passages in the book and locate instances of Lockhart's of foreshadowing of events to come.

6. What does Cady come to learn at the end of the novel—what insights area gained?
(Questions adapted from the author's website.)

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