Family of Liars returns to idyllic Beechwood Island, circa 1987, a magical epoch of lemon hunts and privilege, of first love, and of shocking events that upend the teenage Sinclair sisters’ lives. In Family of Liars, Lockhart reveals the consequences of pretense.If you loved We Were Liars then the backstory of the Sinclair family’s deeply-rooted rifts and allegiances is the book you’ve been waiting for. The Sinclair family believes that “silence shows respect for someone else’s interior life” (182), so they pretend. Obviously, life is more complicated than that, so we resort to telling lies and half-truths or to silence. We need to understand “it’s beautiful to love whomever love” (176). Another shares the notion of acceptance and how our emotional health depends on our belief that we are enough, that we are “perfect just the way are” (176).

They show you value other people that you consider their time, their possessions, their creative effort” (75). While Lockhart confronts the haunting power of grief and the human effort to ban it in this prequel to We Were Liars, she sprinkles in some key morals. After all, sometimes fairy tales come true, and monsters are real. They hurt, they are strange, but we cannot stop reading them, over and over” (54). There is something ugly and true in them. “Our family has always loved fairy tales. Carrie’s role as comforter involves reading fairy tales to Rosemary. Haunted by her sister Rosemary, who drowned at age ten, Carrie attempts to help her ghost crossover. show their love not with honesty or affection, but with loyalty (17). Therefore, the Sinclairs “never speak about medical issues. “The way people see you-it is the way they see all of us” (17).

She has always been taught that “we get by, by being busy” (242) and that “being a credit to the family” (17) is expected. Soon, an escape from pain grows into an addiction. Because Carrie Sinclair is depressed and suffering, dealing with issues of acceptance and a search for belonging, she takes codeine and then Halcion to ease her pain. Tucked in the telling, though, Lockhart also shares how messy and miserable that “pretending, lying, trying to have a good time” (219) can become. We get the benefit of the doubt, the assumption of innocence, conferred by our family name” (277). She not only shares how unearned privilege can lead to “terrible things on top of terrible things” but how those with resources often get a pass: “They assume that girls like us-educated girls from a ‘good family’-they assume we are telling the truth. Lockhart pens a haunting story in Family of Liars.

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