Young Adult Literature; Family Drama
Lockhart is a well-known young adult author, and We Were Liars is published by Delacorte, the young adult imprint of Random House. (An imprint is a smaller publisher within a larger publisher that deals with a specific genre. Fancy.) The narrator is a teenager dealing with typical teenage problems—first love, her parents' divorce—as well as the much larger problems of physical pain and memory loss. So yeah, this read's young adult lit through and through.
Family drama drives the plot, and there's no shortage in Cadence's family. Her mother fights with her aunts, and everybody fights with her grandfather; plus, the moms try to use their kids as pawns in their bids for their father's inheritance, passing the drama on to future generations. Lockhart exacerbates the Sinclairs' issues by trapping them together on an island, with only each other, Ed, and Gat for company. In fairness, though, almost any family would fight if they had to spend that much time in each other's presence.