We Were Liars by E. Lockhart (review)

The eldest granddaughter in an obscenely wealthy New England family, Cadence Sinclair spends summers on their private island. There she’s fascinated by, and later in love with, a boy named Gat Patil, the nephew of her aunt’s dark-skinned Indian boyfriend who joins the cousins for the summer holidays. Cadence is incensed to learn that her grandfather is firmly prejudiced against both Gat and his uncle in ways that will affect the dispersal of the family fortune; meanwhile, Cadence’s mother and her aunts, all vying for the inheritance, shamelessly attempt to use their children to sway their father’s decision and propel the family toward the tragedy at the heart of the book. With Cadence as a fully unreliable and sometimes distancing narrator who has suffered a trauma that she can’t remember, Lockhart weaves a solid tragic story; the events leading to an irreparable and deeply sad event are spooled out in poetic prose interspersed with dark fairy-tale insets that bitterly explore the festering stink of old money, simmering sibling rivalry, and impossible mixed-class romance. The YA twist here is the currently popular device of lost memory and mental breakdown in the aftermath of a horrific event, and while savvy readers will figure out the main trick long before the reveal, the details are still engaging and the inciting problems worth consideration. Given the subject matter, this will pair well with the usual high school canon fodder; readers may not relate to Cadence any more than they do to Gatsby’s Daisy, but the distance imposed by her self-consciously artful storytelling allows for sustained reflection.