5. We Were Liars - E. Lockhart

Read on my iPhone

2014 Delacorte Press

228 pgs.

Genre/Audience

Finished 1/11/15

Goodreads rating:  3.89

My rating:  (3) Liked it  

Setting:  A contemporary private island off the coast of Massachusetts, near Martha's Vineyard

1st sentence/s: 
      "Welcome to the beautiful Sinclair family.
        No one is a criminal
        No one is an addict.
        No one is a failure.
        The Sinclairs are athletic, tall, and handsome.  We are old-money Democrats.  Our smiles are wide, our chins square, and our tennis serves aggressive."

My comments:  I honestly don't know exactly how I feel about this book, so for right now, until I mull it over for awhile, I'll stick with the fact that I liked it.  I loved the suspense, I loved that no matter what my guesses were, I was incorrect.  I like the way the story was put together.  I liked that I could understand the Sinclair family enough that I had instant disdain for them.  I didn't hate it...I didn't love it.  It was, however, a darn good (quick) read.

Becky's review from Becky's Book Reviews

Goodreads book summary:  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. 
          Read it.
And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.

55. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks - E. Lockhart

For: Young Adults
Published: March, 2008
352 pgs.
Rating: 4/5
Finished: Oct. 30, 2008
2009 Printz Honor

This is a SMART book for young adults. It has feminist overtones, and makes you think.

Frankie Landau-Banks has "blossomed" in the summer between her freshman and sophomore years at Alabaster, an elite private school in northern Massachusetts. Really blossomed. She snags the attention of Matthew Livingston, the cutest and most popular senior, and he quickly becomes her boyfriend. She loves hanging out with his crowd, but when she discovers that he is part of a 50 year-old secret society that is ONLY for boys, something is awakened in her, and she comes up with a brilliant plan to make Matthew notice her for more than her body and her cuteness.

Frankie becomes the mastermind behind all sorts of plots that befuddle the administration, but she does it secretly by pretending, online, that's she's part of the Loyal Society of the Bassett Hounds. "Alpha", Matthew's best friend and the "alpha" leader, takes all the credit. But when Frankie is found out, her plans to impress Matthew with her brains backfire.

The relationship between Frankie and Matthew is not developed enough for me. What in heaven's name does she see in him? She is clever, very smart (she even reads Wodehouse!), and quite a feminist. I could believe how she'd become infatuated with Matthew, but I couldn't believe that it would last very long. She's not superficial, and he is. It was a mesmerizing read, though. Once she began planning her escapades it was fun to watch them all play out.

50. Fly on the Wall - E. Lockhart

How One Gir Saw Everything
For: YA
Published: 2006
182 pgs.
Rating: 3.5/Fun
Finished: Oct. 8, 2008

This is the third E. Lockhart novel I've read - all for the TARC YA Reading Group. Lockhart's audience is the female late middle-school/early high-schooler who likes romance novels. I recommended this book to an 8th grader who as been emrboiled in the Clique series (gag), and she liked it a lot. It's led her to others of this genre that are SO much better than the Cliques.

Gretchen Yee, a 16-year-old half-Jewish, Half-Chinese comic book artist, attends the Manhattan School for the Arts, where no one want to be normal or "average". This is tough for her, because that's exactly how she considers herself. Nonetheless, she dies her hair bright red in an attempt to fit in. She has a best friend, Katya, but holds herself off from many of the other students. Literature and Drawing are the two subjects she's having trouble with - Drawing because her art teacher is trying to get her to abandon the comic book style that she loves, and literature because....well, she really doesn't care about literature. The sophomore class is currently studying Kafka's Metamporhasis, and she could care less. She has a huge crush on Titus, a classmate that also appears to be a very nice young man, popular with the Art Rats (the sophomore drawing program), but laments that she doesn't understand boys at all.

One weekend she is magically changed into a fly in the boy's locker room, where she resides for a week, not understanding how she got there or if she'll ever be able to return to her own life. What she observes for this week will change her life, change her confidence in herself, and help her understand boys a whole lot more.

It's a great premise, and I like the way bullying and homophobia are handled. It's an entertaining story, seemingly lighthearted but with a couple of pretty powerful messages included.

41. The Boy Book - E. Lockhart

A Study of Habits and Behaviors, Plus Techniques for Taming Them
For: Young Adult
Pub: 2006
193 pgs.
Rating: 4/5
Read: Aug. 28th (in one sitting)

This is really part two of The Boyfriend List, although it was set up a bit differently and I liked it a bit more. There were still footnotes, but not as many, and not as long, and they didn't seem as obnoxious.

Ruby is still a leper, practically friendless, and still seeing Dr. Z, her shrink. It's now junior year and her life is very, very different than it has been through the beginning of tenth grade. You can see how talking with a psychiatrist (at least a GOOD psychiatrist) helps you understand yourself a little better, as well as how to make the right choices for yourself.

Roo misses Kim but becomes friends with Meghan, who carpools her to school, and becomes friends-again with Nora. She still pines for Jackson, and has become buddies with Noel. She gets a part time job at a zoo, where she really seems to enjoy the animals, and is truly becoming less passive than previously. The crises point in this book comes when all the important characters in the story go together for a sort-of-nature week at "Canoe Island".

It's not a pat, girl-gets-boy ending. It's a REAL ending, an ending that shows growth and maturity and thoughfulness. It's an ending that's truthful. It ends, "I lay there in the blue light from the TV set. Not really watching. Just lying there, between Meghan and Nora..........The water lapped at the sides of our houseboat. And I felt lucky." She's going to be all right.

40. The Boyfriend List - E. Lockhart

A Study of Habits and Behaviors, Plus Techniques for Taming Them

For: Young Adult
Pub: 2005
229 pgs.
Rating: 3.5/5
Finished: Aug. 24, 2008

After quickly skimming some reviews for this book, I found three things that people liked. I agree with one of them.

Organization. Lockhart frames the story using a list of 15 boys that have somehow touched Ruby's (Roo's) life. Yes, it was a clever way of telling the story and worked well introducing characters, but it did not help the time frame, it made the story jump around, I was always confused about whether she was talking about years ago, months ago, weeks ago, or the present. Sometimes I even had to go back a few chapters to figure out the sequence or to double check which boy was which.

Footnotes. There were footnotes on every page, or so it seemed. Long ones. This was how Lockhart continued the story. She could have easily included it in the prose of the story, but I guess she was just trying to be clever or different. I had to jump back and forth, read the bottom, move my eyes over the page above to find where I'd left off, only to have to switch to the bottom again. Hated it. More confusion. At the end of the book is a section called "A Conversation With E. Lockhart". One question asks her what her ten favorit all-time movies are. This list helps me understand from whence her writing style doth cometh, since it included: Annie Hall, Cabaret, Moulin Rouge and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- very telling, eh?

First person perspective. Always love it. (Aha, you guessed it, this is the one with which I agree.)

The plot, when you finally sort out its sequence, is SO sopohmore girl angst-y. The insight that Roo finds from writing AND talking to her "shrink", Dr. Z, is spot-on perfect and not overinflated. Her sophmore year in a small private school, Tate, where she thinks she's the only scholarship student, is complete with being thrilled about having a boyfriend, loving her quartet of best friends, making a few missteps, not knowing what to do, and then screwing everything up. Painfully. And that she lives on a small house boat with her one-woman-performance-artist, macrobiotic mother and her "but how does that make you FEEL" gardening father. And that she has questions and misgivings about boys, sexuality, boys, kissing, boys....you get the idea.

Lots of things to like, a few things to get past, but now I'm ready for the next installment, The Boy Book, which I have to read for a book club, but decided to read this, its predecessor, first.