We Were Liars by E. Lockhart Review: A Darkly Gripping YA Mystery

We Were Liars is a twist-driven young-adult novel that has earned genuine critical acclaim since its 2014 debut, and its reputation as a modern benchmark of the genre is well supported by the record.

We Were Liars centers on Cadence Sinclair Eastman, the eldest granddaughter of Harris Sinclair — a wealthy patriarch who presides over Beechwood Island, a private family compound near Martha's Vineyard. Each summer, Harris's three daughters — Penny, Carrie, and Bess — gather with their children at the island's four mansions: Windemere, Cuddledown, Red Gate, and Clairmont. Cadence, her cousins Johnny and Mirren, and their close friend Gat Patil — the nephew of Carrie's partner, Ed — form the group the family calls "the Liars." During the summer Cadence is fourteen, she and Gat fall in love. The following summer, Cadence suffers a serious head injury, losing most of her memories of what happened. Two years later, she returns to the island still plagued by migraines, a Percocet dependency, and the fragmented knowledge that something went terribly wrong. The novel is structured around her attempt to recover those lost memories, and the consequences that surface when she does. At its core, as Wikipedia's summary notes, We Were Liars focuses on "the consequences of one's mistakes" — set against the backdrop of a family whose wealth and self-image as "Royals of America" have papered over deep dysfunction.

E. Lockhart drew on specific personal experiences and literary sources in constructing the novel. The character of Gat — Indian-American, brilliant, and always slightly outside the Sinclair circle — was shaped, as Lockhart has stated, by her own years as a scholarship student at private schools, as well as by Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. The novel also incorporates a deliberate fairy-tale structure: Lockhart has said she was "captivated" by fairy tale collections as a child and wanted to write "a contemporary story with a fairy-tale structure" to explore themes she had long thought about. That architectural choice gives the book its slightly heightened, fable-like register alongside its realistic emotional core. Lockhart has also noted that people close to her experience chronic migraines, and she was interested in examining how sustained pain distorts personality and perception — an interest that shapes how Cadence's narration itself is rendered on the page.

The novel's reception has been strong and well-documented. Kirkus Reviews awarded it a starred review, calling it "riveting, brutal and beautifully told" and particularly praising Lockhart's humanizing of the Sinclair family. Book Reporter's Carol Fitzgerald described it as "pitch perfect in both plotting and character development." Newsday drew a comparison to Elizabeth Wein's Code Name Verity, noting the novel's rare quality of making readers scramble back through already-devoured chapters to search for clues they missed. Forever Young Adult's Sarah Pitre wrote that the book "glitters and shines, then cuts deep" and described it as a "masterful, darkly mesmerizing portrait of a fractured family ruined by the excess of wealth." We Were Liars won the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Young Adult Fiction and was named an ALA Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults for 2015. It has since grown into a series, with Lockhart going on to become a New York Times bestselling author of the Liars novels, and the story has been adapted as an original series on Prime Video.

The novel's central strength is its plot architecture: the twist is engineered so carefully that the book rewards rereading, with earlier scenes taking on new meaning once the full picture emerges. That structural precision is part of what drew praise from multiple reviewers. The fairy-tale register and Lockhart's deliberately fragmented, figurative prose style also serve the story's themes of memory and distortion. However, that same stylistic choice has a documented cost for some readers. A review at critics noted that Cadence's more figurative emotional descriptions — passages where she renders inner pain in heightened, non-literal terms — could occasionally cause confusion, requiring readers to pause and recognize they are reading figuratively rather than literally. Readers who prefer grounded, realistic prose throughout may find the shifts in register disorienting, at least in the novel's earlier sections.

We Were Liars is designed for readers aged 12 to 17, and its publisher-assigned grade level is 7 through 9 — but its thematic weight (grief, family dysfunction, the corrosive effects of inherited wealth, and the consequences of moral failure) gives it genuine resonance beyond that range. Readers who prize novels built around a carefully concealed revelation — where the pleasure of rereading rivals the first-read experience — will find this a particularly satisfying choice. Those drawn to the intersection of contemporary realism and fairy-tale structure, or to stories that examine how privilege distorts family life, will find both elements woven tightly into the novel's architecture. It is the first book in the Liars series, which continues with Family of Liars and We Fell Apart.