we were liars, e. lockhart
Cadence Eastman – privileged and somewhat sheltered – spends every summer at an island villa with friends of a similar background. She finds love in the form of Gat: idealistic, and very much the only Brown kid in all of this, certainly the only one who gets any lines at all. It's all great until she turns 15. All she knows is that something happened, but she doesn't remember any of it and everyone is determined to hide it from her. Whatever it was, it leaves her with debilitating migraines and residual neurology, which changes the course of the rest of her life.
It makes a weak attempt to say something about intersectionality – in that Cadence's disability and chronic pain doesn't make her automatically an expert in every hardship – as Gat points out repeatedly. But ultimately it takes a while to get to the point, and although it isn't the point but Cady isn't brilliantly likeable. This is a sort of coming of age story in reverse, I guess.
It suffers from a writing style that favours sentence fragments and what starts as pithy short sentences. This strikes this reader as being more dramatic and coy for the sake of it rather than any genuine atmosphere.
There was not much of a journey to Discover The Truth either, which I expected to be the focus – there was little effort required on Cady's behalf. Not very satisfying, given I am usually a fan of this kind of narrative.