We Were Liars

Back again with the Something Strange book/movie club and there really is something strange afoot - this is a TV show not a movie. I don’t talk about TV here because I can’t be arsed, so we’ll cover both in this post. Also, I’m going into spoilers and this whole thing relies on uncovering a key central mystery so if that sort of thing bothers you, look away now.

The story revolves around a rich girl whose family summer on a private island. She grows up with her cousins, and a friend, and the group get called “the liars” by their parents. One year, something major happens, but she gets amnesia and can’t remember what happened. Two years later she comes back to the island to try to piece together the events and figure out what her family aren’t telling her.

I know I’m not the only one who wonders “were they dead all along” when a twist ending is involved, so it was mildly amusing to see it deployed here. In the book it’s handled for emotional impact rather than surprise value, in the TV show not so much.

That’s kind of a theme when comparing the two. The book is over in a couple of hundred pages, it is fragments of memory carefully assembled to paint a picture without anything surplus to requirements. The show is eight hours long, with most of its story lines added in after the fact. There is some effective character work we get to see that doesn’t exist on the page, but otherwise there are whole episodes that are dead weight here. It almost makes you want to tap out.

I’m not the target audience for this young adult stuff at all, but I can vouch for the book. The TV show, not so much.