so im aware my rating is gonna be a little bias bcos it has so much adolescent nostalgia behind it. so again, keep that in mind if you’re wondering if you should give this ago. so what im trying to say is, the first book means a lot to me. it has for eight years. and naturally, a prequel scared the shit out of me. i imagine it’s how fans of Ari and Dante felt when the sequel released last year. but i couldn’t not read this. i owe it to 14 year old me who was sobbing in her bedroom, clutching this to her chest and never wanting to let go. And then IT was revealed and I was all, "WHAT IS THIS LIFE? I REJECT EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS ENDING. NOOOOOOO!!!!"

His father passed on, just this year,” explained Carrie. “He and Johnny are the best of friends. It’s a big help to Ed’s sister if we take him for a few weeks. And, Gat? You’ll get to have cookouts and go swimming like we talked about. Okay?” Cadence and her cousins consider themselves above such petty actions and spend most summers making trouble, being rich and taking advantage of the liquor bar. I’d recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a plot that persuades you to wonder. To readers who can accept the bittersweet circumstances of life displayed within their fiction. This is not a character-driven novel. The story shines brighter. I don't think I ever fully connected with any character at all--and the fact that I was moved to tears by the finish is what made this a five-star read for me. This was not quite as traumatising as its prequel, We Were Liars, for me personally, but still displayed a focus on a wide array of issues, interspersed with scenes of summer fun and how the white and wealthy live. There is something so compelling about reading about the genuinely hard-hitting and the eye-roll worthy 'woe betide me' side-be-side. Our family has always loved fairy tales. There is something ugly and true in them. They hurt, they are strange, but we cannot stop reading them, over and over.

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It’s a very flowery, metaphorical, lots-of-paragraph-breaks style of prose that’s super dreamy and a little too dramatic.

And maybe that makes me sound extremely heartless, but I couldn't relate to the main character (no, I'm not even going to tell you her name because I want you to go in blind). But somewhere along the lines, I started to become intrigued with the story because it became this strange, wild thing that I couldn't piece together. In the summer Carrie is 17, her cousin Yardley comes to stay - brining her boyfriend and two of his mates. Things are about to change in a big way. This audiobook was good. I should have listened to this book before We Were Liars. It would've spoiled some but not much. I want to remember about the aunties and I'm having a hard time remembering. I need to go flip through We Were Liars again to see which aunties is Cadence's mother and who's the aunties for the other girl's mom. It's been 4 books between the first and this prequel, so it's hard for me to remember. I know Aunt Carrie is Johnny's mom. Good thing We Were Liars has the family tree at the beginning of the book! It wasn’t the most traditional sense of mental health representation, but it still gave a very unique look at trauma rep. The trippy, metaphorical writing layered with the distortion from Cadence’s mind added so much to the plot. It made things so much more...confusing, but in a dreamy way. Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.how and why did they let cadence stay in cuddletown in summer seventeen if in reality the three liars are dead!! In Part Two (“Vermont”), Cadence struggles to remember more of her accident. When she asks Penny for details, Penny replies tearfully that Cadence has asked many times before, and always finds the answers upsetting. When Cadence’s father wants to take her to Europe again next summer, Cadence insists on returning to the island. Her mother and father reluctantly settle on a plan for her to spend just the first month of the summer there. Meanwhile, it becomes clear during a visit from Granddad and a phone call with one of the younger cousins that all is not well with the family. Granddad’s mind is starting to fail, the younger cousins gossip about Cadence being a drug addict, and the cousin on the phone thinks the island is haunted. In the summer of 1985, Caroline has so much on her plate: dealing with the grief of drowning 10 years old sister Rosemary whose ghost starts visiting her as her beautiful and self absorbed sisters Bee and Penelope already moved on with her lives, flirting with boys, enjoying summer, pretending nothing tragic happened just like her parents do. They built three new houses on their craggy private island and gave them each a name: Windemere for Penny, Red Gate for Carrie, and Cuddledown for Bess.

The Liars show devotion to each other, but the choices they make are questionable. Gat tries to teach the Liars about life for the other 99 percent of the world, but they're not interested in poverty and struggle. both books had such an impact on the teenage version of me. i know We Were Liars has exploded on tiktok in the past year and it’s become popular with a lot of people disliking it and not understanding the hype. but at the time, this book changed me. i don’t think anyone quite understands. it’s one of the books that reignited my love for reading again. it showed me the impact a book can have on a person and the way they view the world. June 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. 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. The title. It does't make sense to me. I don't want to say anything in case spoilers, but I don't think it's the perfect title. instead, i am just going to say that it is perhaps unwise to market a book in this way. true, the only reason i read it myself was because i came across it when making YA list for work, and i was all "SECRETS?? I LOVE SECRETS!! I WANT TO KNOW THE SECRETS!!" it's a very effective way of drumming up interest around a book.

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The plot introduces itself in a vague manner and slowly unravels. I found that the messages held more power than the characters delivering them—the sum was definitely greater than its parts. Which fit the tone nicely. I swim to shore. I really have a problem with the writing, but this is just a matter of taste. But then again, I've never been a fan of this type of prose. Needless to say, I don't like e.e. cummings. The writing is so often choppy, haphazardly punctuated. The first-person narrator also has a tendency to use very, very dramatic imagery to describe situations. Some situations are false. Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound, Don't take no for an answer is a lesson we teach boys that would be better off learning that no means no."