Revisiting Old Reviews: We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

A feature in which I reflect upon my old reviews.

Time to revisit another old review. I read E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars back in 2014, and recently I started thinking about it. Mostly in terms of how uncritical I was in my reviewing and overall reading. I remember that this book was awesome for me, until it was not, but I remember still raving about it back in the day. So I thought we’d revisit my thoughts on it and discuss critical reading and reviewing. As always, here’s my review back then:

I just loved this book so much. It was great. I found that a lot of people didn’t like the style of the writing, but I honestly thought it was good, with it’s short sentences.  It was sort of eerie, and sometimes gave me the chills. I feel like the writer managed to create a sort of cold atmosphere, the feeling of something bad happening, that flows through the whole book. And you want to know why. You want to see what is behind the perfect cover of the Sinclairs.

I think that the book was really nicely conceptualized and executed. I think that it’s very smart and clever and a really good book when it comes to young adult fiction. This is totally a book worth reading and I would recommend it to absolutely anyone, because it was amazing.

Now, while these posts aren’t about the reviewing process or the structure of reviews, we need to address the elephant in the room: how bad is this review? I had no structure to my writing back then, and my reviews were really incoherent. A little tip: separate your reviews into coherent sections. Talk about the writing first, then characters, then the plot. Or use any other system that works for you. But make it reader friendly. And by all means don’t just puke out your thoughts. Get them in order first.

Anyways, hopefully, my reviews have gotten better, but that’s not the point of this post (maybe it can be the point of another one). Let’s talk about my review. As you can see, I gushed about this. A lot. And I did enjoy this book. However, you probably know by now that there’s a plot twist at the end of this book. And I guessed it pretty early on. And I hated that twist. I was dreading it throughout the book. And then it happened and I was really annoyed by it. And yet, I produced the above review.

This is something I used to do a lot. If a book was really popular, and I enjoyed most of it, I had trouble being critical of it. Even though I think that this ending is in fact lazy. When there’s a mystery, I don’t like to guess the ending. But I especially don’t want to guess THIS ending. And so I had trouble separating that annoyance about the ending and the rest of the book, which I really enjoyed.

A confession: I like reading about pretentious people (A Little Life is one of my favorite books ever). So I liked the pretentious air this book had around it. And I like the setting and the writing. However, the ending is a big part of this story. It is the story itself. Which means I really don’t feel that this book was that clever or that well executed and thought out. So, what’s my final verdict? 

Obviously, I liked some aspects of the book, but the ending kind of ruined it. So my utter infatuation (or just my review) doesn’t really make sense. So I am changing my initial thoughts and changing my rating to… 3 stars. I do want to read more of E. Lockhart’s books though.

So that’s it! Let me know if you have read We Were Liars and what your thoughts on it were. And ENTER THE GIVEAWAY!

xxx

Come hang out with me:

Follow me on Bloglovin’ | Goodreads | Tumblr | Books Amino | Twitter | Instagram

*Above used Book Depository links are affiliate links which means I get a small commission if you buy a book through my link, which helps me out a lot!