Book Pick for January 2026
If anyone remembers when We Were Liars hit the markets circa 2014, it was a Young Adult book I could not put down. I wasn’t the only one taken in by the shocking ending, and the book became a sensation. The Amazon Prime series was good but failed to capture that first read intensity. We Fell Apart didn’t read as quickly for me – but was just as deft at luring me into the lives of the east coast summer people only this time in a slow burn. We Fell Apart is not a prequel to the We Were Liars, but a parallel story of an entirely different family, but one that is just as messy.
The story begins in California where Matilda has just turned eighteen and been ghosted by her free spirit mother who followed a new love to Mexico, leaving Matilda with her mother’s ex-boyfriend. The B-List actor steps in as a surrogate stepfather, but when Matilda’s real father reaches out and requests her presence she jumps at the chance. Matilda’s real father, she had discovered, was the famous painter Kingsley Cello. He lures her to his Hampton’s “castle” with the hope of forming a relationship and gifting her one of his priceless paintings. Her pseudo-stepfather lends her money to fly across the country to meet her mysterious father, who neglected that small detail.
When she arrives she is greeted, not by her father, but a brother she didn’t know she had.
In fact, her father is nowhere to be seen.
When her father’s wife drugs her and takes her phone and laptop, locking them up per her house rules, Matilda is cut off from communication with Kingsley. Her half-brother, Meer, continues to tell her he will return and that he does this sometimes. He begs her to stay and she agrees, still hoping to find her own identity in her father despite the bizarre welcome.
Meer isn’t her only friend in the “Castle.” Kingsley has “adopted” a former child star, Brock, into the dry lifestyle of his home. The surly cab driver, Tatum, who delivered her to the “Castle” upon her arrival is also living on the premises and is a pseudo brother to Meer after his own parents’ deaths. The Motley crew makes a family that revels in their own brand of summering on the coast as the truth Matilda craved emerges – though perhaps not the truth or family she was seeking.
Lockhart excels at character development of people that are broken and yet lovable and placing them in the most twisted family scenarios. This book only goes to prove Tolstoy’s truth, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
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