"The family never speaks of it."Ĭadence makes a tight little group with the two grandchildren her own age, Johnny and Mirren, and an outsider, Gat, who joins them every year. "I don't know what happened," Cadence says of her aunt's divorce. Raw emotions are hidden by a curtain of politeness.
The Sinclairs are beset by deaths, addictions and the tragedies that afflict all families, however privileged, but they tuck them away behind their strong chins and perfect smiles.
Every year, the Sinclairs spend their summer on a private island, where the grandparents have built four houses for themselves and their three daughters, plus a smaller building for their cooks and cleaners. It's adorably warm and funny, and I was expecting more of the same, but We Were Liars is quite different: cool, bitter and brutal, this compelling short novel casts a dispassionate eye on the insular world of the American oligarchy.Ĭadence is the eldest granddaughter of a family so rich that they never mention money. I'd only read one of them, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, the tale of a feisty teenage girl at a prestigious boarding school who refuses to play by the rules.
The American writer Emily Jenkins writes picture books and for adults under her own name, and YA novels as E Lockhart. And indeed she does, but her story soon descends into much murkier waters, eyeing its teenage protagonist with a twisted smile and a tragic sense of the pain wrought by selfish, self-absorbed adolescents. "J une of the summer I was 15, my father ran off with some woman he loved more than us." Cadence Sinclair, the teenage narrator of We Were Liars, initially seems very familiar: quirky, perky, sentimental and charming, blessed with an unusual name and a neat turn of phrase, surely she's going to lead us on a tale of unrequited love studded with witty one-liners.
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