by E. Lockhart
~DRINKS~
White wine. Penny likes pinot grigio, Sancerre, and Riesling. Definitely not chardonnay.
Strawberry lemonade. The Sinclairs like Hubert’s brand.
Fizzy lemonade. Preferred brand: San Pellegrino Limonata—or you can make your own, subbing in club soda in this recipe from Ina Garten’s The Barefoot Contessa: foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/fresh-lemonade-recipe.html
WANT TO GO ALL OUT AND MAKE DINNER?
Swordfish. In We Were Liars, the Sinclairs eat swordfish with basil sauce. Here’s a recipe from Giada De Laurentiis’s Everyday Italian. foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/swordfish-with-citrus-pesto-recipe.html
Buy ethically sourced fish, please. The Sinclairs get theirs from Larsen’s Fish Market on Martha’s Vineyard, but they send the housekeeper over to buy it. Larsen’s: larsensfishmarket.com
Corn. Boil some corn on the cob if it’s in season. Serve with butter and salt.
Tomato salad. Serve with a sliced tomato salad like this one from Suzanne Goin’s Sunday Suppers at Lucques. threemorebigbites.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/cookbooks-suzanne-goins-heirloom-tomato-salad-with-burrata-salad
Green salad. If corn can’t be had, or if the tomatoes at your local store are depressing, get some Boston lettuce and maybe some red leaf lettuce and toss it with this Ina Garten dressing, which makes enough for you to use for weeks—you’ll never buy bottled again: foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/green-salad-with-creamy-mustard-vinaigrette-recipe.html
Bread: baguettes, warm from the oven.
Fudge: The Sinclairs don’t serve it, but this is Gat’s favorite, so I think you should make fudge. Here’s a surprising recipe from chocolate master David Lebovitz, author of Ready for Dessert: davidlebovitz.com/2012/02/marshmallow-cream-fantasy-fudge-recipe. Or you can order the actual fudge Cady brings Gat from Edgartown. It’s from Murdick’s Fudge. They ship! murdicks.com/fudge
1. Describe the Sinclairs. In what ways are their family experiences unique? In what ways are they like most other families? How do they deal with deaths, addictions, and the tragedies that afflict all types of families?
2. In what ways does her father’s abandonment of their family impact Cadence? What can be inferred about his choice to no longer live as part of the Sinclair family?
3. Consider Cadence’s narration. Though she freely admits she remembers little and is on a number of medications, do you believe her version of the story?
4. What role does Cadence’s grandfather play in the story? How does his role as patriarch define the choices made by his children and grandchildren? To what extent is he to blame for the shortcomings of others?
5. When describing her aunt’s divorce, Cadence states, “I don’t know what happened. The family never speaks of it.” In what ways does the family’s curtain of politeness paralyze them?
6. When Cady falls in love with Gat, their relationship and his role as an outsider to the family threaten to overturn the social order. In your opinion, what is the real danger of their relationship? To whom?
7. Discuss the significance of the title, We Were Liars. In what ways does it accurately describe the events and relationships portrayed in the novel?
8. How does the author’s use of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights influence the story?
9. Compare the parent/child relationships in the story. To what extent are the relationships of these characters shaped by the world around them? To what extent do their relationships shape that world?
10. Consider the moral questions raised by this novel. How does Lockhart handle topics of racism, land ownership, inheritance, materialism, greed, and manipulation? In your opinion, in what ways do these elements enrich the story?
11. Do you believe the Liars were justified in any way in committing the crime they committed? Was the crime successful in any way?
12. Was the ending a surprise, or did you see it coming? Return to earlier passages in the book and locate instances of Lockhart’s use of foreshadowing.
13. What do you feel Cadence learns at the end of the novel? What insights does she gain?
14. What five words would you use to describe We Were Liars?
Prepared by Dr. Rose Brock, Young Adult Literature Consultant, Grapevine, TX.
IMOGEN is a runaway heiress, an orphan, a cook, and a cheat.
JULE is a fighter, a social chameleon, and an athlete.
An intense friendship. A disappearance. A murder, or maybe two.
A bad romance, or maybe three.
Blunt objects, disguises, blood, and chocolate. The American dream, superheroes, spies, and villains.
A girl who refuses to give people what they want from her.
A girl who refuses to be the person she once was.
FOUR CASINOS DOWN ON the strip, Jule surveyed six restaurants until she found a place to order a coffee and chat up a lonely college student who was just starting work on the night shift. The place was a 1950s diner replica. The waitress was a tiny woman with freckles and soft brown curls. She wore a polka-dot dress and a frilly housewife’s apron. When a crowd of drunk guys barged in talking about beer and burgers, Jule put some cash on the counter to pay for her food and then slid into the kitchen. She snagged the most feminine backpack off a line of hooks and left through a back exit into the casino’s service hallway. Running down a flight and then out into the alley, she shouldered the pack and pushed her way through a group of people lined up for a magic show.
A ways down she rummaged through the bag. In the zipper pocket was a passport. The name on it was Adelaide Belle Perry, age twenty-one.
It was a lucky take. Jule had figured she might have to work a long time before she got a passport. She felt sorry for Perry, though, and after taking the passport, she turned the backpack in to a lost properties office.
Back on the strip, she found a wig store and two clothing shops. She stocked up, and by morning, she had moved casinos twice more. Wearing a wavy blond wig and orange lipstick, she lifted the license of one Dakota Pleasance, five foot two. In a black wig and a silver jacket, she snagged the passport of Dorothea von Schnell of Germany, five foot three.
By eight a.m., Jule was back in the joggers and Vans, her face wiped clean. She got a cab to the Rio hotel and took the elevator to the roof. She had read about the VooDoo Lounge, fifty-one stories up. When a battle is over, when he has lived to fight again another day, the great white hetero action hero goes somewhere high above the city, somewhere with a view. Iron Man, Spider-Man, Batman, Wolverine, Jason Bourne, James Bond—they all do it. The hero gazes out at the pain and beauty contained in the twinkling lights of the metropolis. He thinks about his special mission, his unique talents, his strength, his strange, violent life, and all the sacrifices he makes to live it.
The VooDoo Lounge early in the morning was little more than a cement expanse of roof dotted with red and black couches. The chairs were shaped like enormous hands. A staircase curved above the roof. Patrons could climb it for a better view of the Vegas strip below. There were a couple of cages for showgirls to dance in, but no one was in the lounge now except a janitor. He raised his eyebrows as Jule came in. “I just want to have a look,” she told him. “I’m harmless, I swear.”
“Of course you are,” he said. “Go ahead. I’m mopping up.”
Jule went to the top of the staircase and gazed at the city. She thought of all the lives being led down there. People were buying toothpaste, having arguments, picking up eggs on the way home from work. They lived their lives surrounded by all that glitter and neon, happily assuming that small, cute women were harmless.
Three years ago, Julietta West Williams was fifteen. She’d been in an arcade—a big one, air-conditioned and shiny-new. She was racking up points on a war simulation. She was lost in it, shooting, when two boys she knew from school came up behind her and grabbed her boobs. One on each side.
Julietta elbowed one sharply in
his soft stomach, then swung around and stomped hard on the other one’s foot. Then she kneed him in the groin.
It was the first time she’d ever hit anyone outside of her martial arts classes. The first time she’d needed to.
All right, she hadn’t needed to. She’d wanted to. She enjoyed it.
When that boy bent over, coughing, Jule turned and hit the first one in the face with the heel of her hand. His head flew back and she grabbed him by the front of his T-shirt and yelled into his greasy ear, “I’m not yours to touch.”
She wanted to see fear on that boy’s face, and to see his friend crumpled over on a nearby bench. Those two boys had always been so cocky at school, afraid of nothing.
A pimple-face man who worked at the arcade came over and grabbed Julietta’s arm. “We can’t have fighting in here, miss. I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.”
“Are you grabbing my arm?” she asked him. “ ’Cause I don’t want you to grab my arm.”
He had dropped it fast.
He was afraid of her.
He was six inches taller than her and at least three years older. He was a grown man, and he was afraid of her.
It felt good.
Julietta had left the arcade. She didn’t worry that the boys would follow her. She felt like she was in a movie. She hadn’t known she could take care of herself that way, hadn’t known that the strength she’d been building in the classes and in the weight room at the high school would pay off. She realized she had built armor for herself. Perhaps that was what she’d been intending to do.
She looked the same, looked just like anyone, but she saw the world differently after that. To be a physically powerful woman—it was something. You could go anywhere, do anything, if you were difficult to hurt.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
E. LOCKHART wrote the New York Times bestseller We Were Liars and Genuine Fraud, a psychological thriller. Her other books include Fly on the Wall, Dramarama, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, and the Ruby Oliver Quartet: The Boyfriend List, The Boy Book, The Treasure Map of Boys, and Real Live Boyfriends. Visit her online at emilylockhart.com, and follow @elockhart on Twitter.
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