Admittedly, I read this purely because of it's recent hype over on the book community on YouTube and it's feature on Booksplosion. When I actually picked up the book in Waterstones, it didn't immediately grab me as something amazing but I bought it anyway. That's what peer pressure does to you kids, even us book nerds have peer pressure.
Basically, We Were Liars written by E L Lockhart and published by Hot Key Books is a short stand alone that is essentially about wealth. Oddly, before I give you a summary, I'm going to explain that even a brief summary of this book will probably ruin it for you. I know it ruined it for me, so if you plan on reading this then I recommend you avert your eyes.
To be as non-spoilery as possible, this book is about a girl from a very wealthy family who is suffering from retrograde amnesia. Every summer her entire extended family goes to their private island to enjoy a few months of sun, and privacy.
That is about all I can say without spoiling the entire plot for you. Personally, this book was not to my tastes. I felt like it was a slow read, it never grabbed me and made me really want to know what was going on. The narrator was frustrating and aggravating, I disliked her exaggerated and frankly weird metaphors and I felt like she had very little growth as a character. I had also been made very aware that there was some big plot twist in the novel, which in itself ruined the book for me because I was constantly trying to guess the twist, and when it was finally revealed I was not shocked in the slightest.
To further explain this point, let me use John Green's The Fault in Our Stars as a reference point. From the get go of TFIOS l you prepare yourself for the obvious conclusion of the novel, that the protagonist will die and leave her star crossed lover. And when Green violently rips Gus (The star crossed lover) from the readers loving embrace and kills him like he does every other character we readers love, it was a serious plot twist. I know that I, for one, threw my hardback dramatically away from me and started making odd whimpering noise. Started mumbling about 'the feels'.
In 'We Were Liars' when I found out that (SPOILERS) all of her cousins were dead, I didn't even really react at all. It was kind of a 'meh', as opposed to 'OH GOOD GOD HOW DARE YOU'
And no, it didn't make me flick back to the beginning of the book to 'see how I missed it', it made me wonder when Young Adult contemporaries got so far fetched. Ghosts? Really?
With that being said, I wouldn't necessarily tell people not to read this, as it was quite well written and thought through. The writing style was fast paced and condensed, and it was mildly enjoyable.
I am not, however, going to give it the same rave review as others. It is very rare I ever dislike a book, and I would not say that I disliked this, but I didn't particularly enjoy it either. It's a step above the books that I had to put down after one chapter because they were too awful to endure any longer, but it wasn't much above.
I would give this book 40% on my scale.
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