🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 3.1/5 | Steam: 🔥
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read We Were Liars yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
Rich people. On their own private island. That’s basically where we are for a really long time. The Sinclair family — old money, very “we summer here,” Cape Cod adjacent — has this private island called Beechwood, and every summer the whole family shows up and does rich family things. Grandfather Harris is the patriarch and he’s awful in that quiet, controlling way where he doles out money to his three daughters and uses it to keep them in line. Tipper is the grandmother, she’s lovely, so naturally she dies.
Our narrator is Cadence, Cady, and she is SO solemn. Like, unrelentingly solemn. Every sentence is delivered like a tragedy. There’s this thing that happens where she describes her feelings as “blood flows down my arms, coming out of her eyes” and I had to stop and just sit with that for a second. Like, what the hell? What does that even mean? I don’t get it. I genuinely do not understand what kind of attempted literary thing is happening there and it made me feel annoyed, because I don’t think it was me — there was no blood running down her… so like it was feelings? Or what?
The Liars
The Liars are Cady’s whole world on that island. Her cousin Johnny. Her cousin Mirren. And Gat — Johnny’s friend from outside the family, who’s been coming to the island for years and who Cady is completely in love with. The four of them are inseparable every summer. They see through the Sinclair performance and don’t pretend otherwise.
Where It All Starts
Right at the beginning of the book, before we even get into the heart of things, Cady’s dad walks out. Her parents split, he leaves, and that’s just the condition she’s living in now. She doesn’t fall apart, doesn’t chase him. It becomes part of her baseline. He just can’t keep up with the expectations of being a Sinclair.
Then comes the summer she calls fifteen. The summer she can’t remember.
The Full Story
Cady and Gat fall in love, but they only really see each other during the summer, except it’s complicated because one summer he was sending roses to some girl in New York while Cady was apparently waiting for him on the island, and then they sort of get back together later. Very teenage, very dramatic.
The grandfather is obsessed with stuff. Heirlooms, legacy, things. Clairmont — the main house on the island — is full of it. And after Tipper dies he gets worse, and the daughters are constantly jockeying for position and fighting over who’s going to get what, and it’s just very depressing in that specific way where money makes everyone gross and spiteful.
I’ll be real with you — I was like 30% into this audiobook before I actually looked up what it was about. That’s how slow the pacing is. The narrator is so serious about everything all the time that it’s hard to clock what actually matters versus what’s just the general vibe of the book being very sad about being rich.
Summer 15 is the incident. The Liars, fed up with everything — the materialism, the grandfather controlling everyone with money, all of it — decide to burn Clairmont down. They’re drunk and they decide it should be a cleansing, a rebellion against everything the house represents. It’s not a plan. It’s a drunken idea that feels like the right thing in the moment.
Except Cady lit the ground floor too early. The fire spread way faster than anyone expected.
And Cady woke up on the beach with head trauma and amnesia and no memory of what happened.
The Ending
Summer 17, Cady comes back to the island. New Clairmont has been built. She finds the Liars at the Cuddledown house — Johnny, Mirren, Gat — and they’re just there, hanging out, completely normal. And they spend the whole summer together and slowly she starts to piece together the truth.
Johnny, Mirren, and Gat have been dead for two years. The entire time she’s been with them on the island, they’ve been ghosts, or hallucinations, or some combination — the book is a little vague on the mechanics of it — but they weren’t really there. It was all Cady trying to process what she couldn’t face: that she survived and they didn’t.
The grandfather told the family it was an overturned gasoline tank. Everyone just went with it.
Once she has figured out what happened, the Liars fade into the ocean and Cady is left alone with the truth and her guilt.
Okay, I’ll give the book this — the twist is actually good. I didn’t see it coming at all, partly because I was so confused for most of the runtime that I wasn’t tracking the clues the way I probably should have been. So that part lands. The setup for it is there, it’s decent, and it is genuinely sad when you get it.
Best Part of This Book
The twist. When it clicked, when I understood what the book had been doing the whole time — that was effective storytelling. The clues were seeded in without being obvious, and the way the Liars’ behavior made complete sense in retrospect was well-constructed. The reveal deserved its reputation.
Worst Part of This Book
The narration style. The whole “I was pretty once. Now I am a girl walking in the fog. Blood flows down my arms” energy. I know what Lockhart was going for — Cady’s trauma bleeding into the prose, the dissociation, the grief. I get it. But it was overdone for me and made it hard to connect early on. There’s a version of this where the poetic style enhances everything, and there’s a version where it just slows you down. I was in the second version for most of the first half.
Would I Relisten?
No. This was another slog and I don’t think I could go back to it. The narrator being so completely solemn for the entire audiobook makes it exhausting — like, when everything is delivered at peak gravitas, nothing lands with extra weight because it’s all already at maximum weight. And the metaphorical language just didn’t work for me. It felt like it was trying really hard to be literary and I couldn’t get there with it. It also made it confusing, where I would need to go back multiple times and relisten to it because she says weird lines like her “dad pulled out a gun and shot her in the chest” but no gun was pulled, no shot was fired. She also said something that made me wonder if she slit her wrists, but that didn’t happen either. The twist is good but it’s not good enough to sit through the whole thing again.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
Amazon CA | Amazon US | Bookshop.org
🎧 Audiobook
Audible CA | Audible US | Libro.fm
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Genre: YA Fiction | Steam: 🔥
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