Welcome friend! Family of Liars is the prequel to We Were Liars, yet it has to be read after it. I love prequels that work this way. They promise context to what we know already happened. They offer history through a new narrator, realizing the emotional and moral groundwork beneath events we thought we understood.
E. Lockhart | We Were Liars # 2 | Goodreads
The prequel to We Were Liars takes readers back to the story of another summer, another generation, and the secrets that will haunt them for decades to come.
A windswept private island off the coast of Massachusetts.
A hungry ocean, churning with secrets and sorrow.
A fiery, addicted heiress. An irresistible, unpredictable boy.
A summer of unforgivable betrayal and terrible mistakes.
Welcome back to the Sinclair family.
They were always liars.
Family of Liars – Review
This time, the story belongs to Carrie Sinclair – the mother of Johnny, and the oldest daughter of the Sinclair family. In the very first pages, Carrie speaks to her dead son. This made me think of one of the scenes from We Were Liars when Cadence saw her aunt talking aloud to Johnny, who wasn’t there.
Johnny asks his mother why he died, and she tells him the story of the summer when she was fourteen. A summer she admits she may not be able to tell truthfully. “I have been a liar all my life, you see. It’s not uncommon in our family.” These words set the stage for the summer of 1984 when everything changed.
Returning to the Sinclair island through Carrie’s eyes feels both familiar and unsettling. This is the same island Cadence would frequent every summer decades later, but here it is inhabited not just by the immediate family but by Harris’s younger brother and his daughter Yardley. Their presence introduces new relationships, new tensions, and ultimately, irreversible consequences.
In signature Lockhart style, there are fairytales woken into the narrative. Carrie sees herself as separate from her family. She is the step-sister, she is the ghost. She is grieving the loss of her baby sister Rosemary in ways the rest of the family refuses to acknowledge. Where Penny and Beth learn silence, Carrie aches to mourn openly. But in the Sinclair family, grief is something to be hidden, controlled, and buried.
Carrie is fourteen, her sisters past the age of needing her as they used to, and she feels the loss of that closeness acutely. She is the eldest who is no longer needed the same way… until she is. When love enters her life, it brings instability and fleeting comfort. What begins as the fragile excitement of being chosen soon reveals itself to be something far more dangerous.
This is where the plot gets very interesting. What starts off as a boy playing two sisters ends in death and a cover-up. Lockhart shows with quiet precision, how lies are born—not always from cruelty, but from the desperate instinct to preserve what remains. She shows grief in its many flavours. Carrie makes choices in that summer that echo across decades. Knowing the older Carrie from We Were Liars, knowing the grief she carries, gives every moment in this prequel a haunting inevitability.
Like with We Were Liars, I find myself thinking about the end a lot. Of blinding rage, self-preservation, acceptance, and familial love.
I think about how within a few decades, so much can get erased if people never talk about it. From We Were Liars, I would never have guessed Harris had any other family. Family of Liars adds layers to characters from the first book. It sheds light on Harris and the family values he demands of his girls, Tipper as the matriarch, Penny as a young girl, and the personality traits that later define her relationship with Cadence.
Watching the younger Carrie struggle to understand herself and her place within the family gave new depth to the woman she becomes. Lying by omission is still lying, and as Carrie discovers, for grief in particular, talking is the way forward, not silence. But for anyone who has read any of the books, we know the Sinclairs are not talkers.
Having also read We Fell Apart, I am struck by how each shift in time and perspective reshapes my understanding of the Sinclairs. Each book reveals not just new events, but new truths about the people I already met. As I get older, and my husband and I reflect on our childhoods together, I think about how families shape each other in ways both visible and invisible. The stories we tell, the ones we hide, and the ones we never find words for all live on, shaping who we become.
Family of Liars is a story about grief, silence, and the lies families tell to survive. It reveals how the past is never truly gone—it simply waits for someone willing to speak it aloud.
One day, I will revisit this series again.
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