Lockhart is definitely a writer I admire, and one of the things I like most about her is the fact that she is so versatile. All her books (or series, at least) are so different from each other. That’s some skill.

So I was looking forward to reading her psychological suspense. We Were Liars is about Cadence Sinclair and the rest of the Sinclair clan. Specifically, she spends all her summers on the family island with her cousins (Mirren and Johnny) plus the nephew of her aunt’s live-in boyfriend, Gat.

Cadence gives us a quick history of her childhood on the island, which is where the families come together for the summer only—they don’t see each other at all outside of summer. Then we get to “summer fifteen” when she and the others are fifteen and they hang around, swim, and talk. Just generally laze. But there’s more going on. For one, Cadence is in love with Gat, who supposedly has a girlfriend back home, but the two start up anyway. Everything is grand.

And then one day it’s not.

Cadence is narrating the book as a seventeen-year-old. She suffered some traumatic brain injury in summer fifteen and all she knows about what happened was that she’d been found basically washed up on the beach in her underwear. Now she gets horrific headaches and is half-addicted to pain pills. She doesn’t go back to the island until summer seventeen, when she’s still desperately trying to remember what happened. It starts coming back in bits and pieces until we finally get the final fragment.

We Were Liars seems to be kind of a polarizing book, looking at Goodreads. So I feel a little odd reporting that I wasn’t super-wowed by the book. I liked it and I’m glad I read it, but I didn’t really feel strongly about it. Everyone knows there’s a twist near the end and some people see it coming and some don’t. My experience was kind of odd—I didn’t specifically see it coming, but once I hit it, I didn’t feel particularly surprised. Maybe I was in a weird mood when I got there. I don’t know. Still, it’s the kind of story you think about even after you put the book down.

If you like psychological thrillers and YA, or Lockhart, give this one a shot.