Darlene's Book Nook: #Audiobook #Review: 3 out of 5 stars for We Were Liars by E. Lockhart @elockhart @LLAudiobooks

Monday, December 12, 2016

#Audiobook #Review: 3 out of 5 stars for We Were Liars by E. Lockhart @elockhart @LLAudiobooks

TITLE: We Were Liars

AUTHOR: E. Lockhart

NARRATOR: Ariadne Meyers

PUBLISHER: Listening Library

PUBLICATION DATE: May 13, 2014

FORMAT: Unabridged audiobook

LENGTH: 6 hrs and 27 mins

GENRE: Young Adult, Mystery

"Thrilling, beautiful, and blisteringly smart, We Were Liars is utterly unforgettable." - John Green, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars.

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.

Listen to it.

And if anyone asks you how it ends, just lie.

MY REVIEW:

I received a complimentary copy of this audiobook for voluntary review consideration.

The Sinclairs are a wealthy family. They spend their summers on their own private island off the coast of Massachusetts, where Harris Sinclair built a home for himself and one for each of his three daughters: Carrie, Bess, and Penny. The main character in the story is 17-year-old Cadence Sinclair Eastman, whose mother is Penny. The story then goes back in time to the summer when Cadence was 15 years old, and that was when her dad left her mom for another woman. She spends the summer at Beechwood Island with her relatives, like any other year, but something traumatic happens to Cadence and she has no memory of the incident. She remembers plunging into the ocean, and she is left with migraine headaches caused by traumatic brain injury. She is given prescription drugs for the pain, but it doesn’t help very much. The following summer, rather than spend it with her relatives on Beechwood Island, she goes on a 10-week trip to Europe with her father. She sends emails to her cousins, telling them how much she is missing them with their first summer apart, but no one writes her back. The following summer, she returns to Beechwood Island and that’s where the story finally unravels and we find out what happened to Cadence.

The story was really slow and dragged in the middle, with not a lot was going on. The last 75 pages were where everything finally came together, and that is what saved the story. Ms. Lockhart totally blindsided me with the truth that I never saw coming, and I love it when an author can do that! There is a twist within a twist, and that’s really all that I can say without any spoilers. Ms. Lockhart also incorporates an unusual way of story-telling, where she inserts fairy tales that incorporate members of the Sinclair family and which give you clues as to what is going on.

So, if you are looking for something a little different and don’t mind a slow build-up, the ending is definitely worth it!

The narrator, Ariadne Meyers, is new-to-me and was fantastic! She conveyed all the right emotions with the tone of her voice, and her pacing was on queue. She carried the story through the slow parts and, for me, that’s when I’m thankful that I’m listening to an audiobook rather than reading it. Here's a sample of the narration:

MY RATING: