Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Book Review: We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

I rated it 3.5 out of 5 stars.


Overview:
A beautiful and distinguished family.
A private island.
A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.
A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive.
A revolution. An accident. A secret.
Lies upon lies.
True love.
The truth.

We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from National Book Award finalist and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart.

Read it.
And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.


Review: Mixed feelings on this one. When this book came out last year, everyone was raving about it. I tend to ignore hype and let it fizzle out and if I'm still interested in it, I'll give it a read. The writing was very fragmented and the
fragments were
like this
seriously it was written
like this
trying to be lyrical, or
a poem.
I don't know.

But if that just annoyed you, the book might annoy you too. Some of the lines were pretty, and some of the metaphors I had to read once or twice because I wasn't sure it was literal or metaphorical, which irked me. The romance was pretty flat. I get the Wuthering Heights things, but it just didn't deliver in this book.

What was good about this book is that it kept me guessing, and it kept me reading, which means it's good if it can do that. But the big twist that came made me want to shake my head, because I hate when this stuff pops up in books. I guess I can't reveal the twist if you are interested in reading.

But in short. It was good because it kept me interested and I wanted to know what happened, but everything besides that, like characters, structure, plot, was 'ehhh' for me.

Oh by the way, the book doesn't explain why the four young adults are called 'Liars.' So that also irritated me.

4 comments:

  1. A book in prose, eh? I would have a difficult time reading that too, but I imagine you get used to it after a while.

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  2. I hate prose outside of poetry. It does irritate me. The good thing is that I tend to read it faster. The bad thing is that I'm annoyed the whole time. Which probably clouds how I ultimately feel about the stories.

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  3. Is there
    really
    any freakin' reason
    to write
    a book like this?

    Ughhhhh pretentious. I read a book last year that didn't use quotations marks for dialogue and instead, used em-dashes. That annoyed me (so did the endless details and the extremely unsatisfying ending).

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  4. As long as there's a reason to it, I'm totally okay with it, but I didn't see the point when it came to this book.

    ReplyDelete