Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Well, we aren’t calling you truthers…

Family of Liars by E. Lockhart

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Right out of the gate, I’ve gotta be honest and say I forget most of We Were Liars, the book this is the prequel story to. I distinctly remember the grand reveal, the “we were liars” moment, catching me wildly off guard, but I only have the loosest idea of what occurred in those pages. Thankfully, this prequel book isn’t the type to rely heavily upon having intimate knowledge of the other book to appreciate it. I’d probably have enjoyed it plenty more if the […]

Well, that escalated quickly

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

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Onto another of the books from my Christmas haul, We Were Liars isn’t my favorite book of the year so far, but it does probably take the title of most surprising. I thought I knew what I was getting into with this one, except I didn’t expect the lies that wound up being unearthed. What seems like an innocent enough story about a family absolutely obsessed with securing what they feel is rightly theirs from their aging, rich grandfather, and the grandkids who are unwittingly […]

“We are liars. We are beautiful and privileged. We are cracked and broken.”

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Continuing my unintentional trend of books about rich people in vacation homes: We Were Liars a story about a Kennedy-esq family, the Sinclairs, as told by the unreliable narrator Cadence (Cady) Sinclair Easton. “I suffer migraines. I do not suffer fools.” Two summers ago Cady, then fifteen, suffered some sort of accident that has left her suffering from amnesia and migraines. Prior to the accident Cady and her cousins shared happy summers at their family’s private island. Cady, the oldest grandchild in the Sinclair dynasty, is particularly […]

Aren’t we all?

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I knew nothing about We Were Liars before going in (except that it had a good title and an appealing cover), and that’s probably the best way to approach this book – I’m going to have a hard time reviewing it without giving anything away. The Sinclair family is beautiful, wealthy, and numerous. Normally spread across the country, they spend each summer on their own private island just off Massachusetts, in houses purposefully built for them by the wealthy patriarch. Our narrator is the teenaged […]

We Were Alright

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I picked this up solely because I adored the title. The cover seemed calm and mysterious as it stood there on the library shelf. I wasn’t in the market for new books to read, but I thought “eh why not?” Unfortunately I never came to love we were liars. It was a pleasant enough read, short and light. I, however, was expecting a beautiful slow read about families and secrets and the special bonds formed when people grow up together. It wasn’t. Instead it was […]

YMMV on this very well-written, hard-to-put-down book with a been-there-done-that ‘surprise’ ending that I nevertheless didn’t like all that much.

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Oyyyyyyyyyyy. This book. This well-written, stylistically self-assured, engaging book. This frustrating, sorta smug, but ultimately cliched, little book. This is one of those times where things are complicated. First, the book was good, but that doesn’t mean I like it. Second, the ending ruined everything. I try not to deliver spoilers in my reviews anyway, but in this case the enjoyment of the book is almost entirely based on knowing absolutely nothing going in, so I will say absolutely nothing about it. At least, not […]



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