Sometimes, novelists like to shake a story up with a dramatic late-in-the-game revelation that makes readers reconsider everything that came before it. In Gone Girl, the smash 2012 bestseller by Gillian Flynn, a major character’s confession at the halfway point suddenly turns a straightforward missing-person mystery into a knotty tale of deception and revenge. When this sort of thing works, readers experience a satisfying a-ha! moment; at worst, they feel deceived—especially when they realize how much the author was hiding to make the twist work.

E. Lockhart’s Kirkus-starred YA bestseller We Were Liars (2014) initially seems like a straightforward tale of poor little rich teens, but near the end it reveals itself as a more ambitious work—if, ultimately, a somewhat unoriginal one. A new Prime Video series adaptation premieres on June 18.

In the novel, 17-year-old Cady Eastman is a scion of the very rich, white, blond, Kennedy-esque Sinclair family of New England, whom she describes as “old-money Democrats. Our smiles are wide, our chins square, and our tennis serves aggressive.” Readers quickly find out that the Sinclairs, as a rule, don’t speak about uncomfortable truths, such as divorces; they never express unpleasant emotions, and they often jockey with one another for the approval of patriarch Harris, who controls his clan with casual threats of disinheritance. They all summer on the family’s personal island, near Martha’s Vineyard; Cady spends most of each season with her same-age cousins Johnny Dennis and Mirren Sheffield, as well as Gat Patil, the Indian American nephew of Cady's aunt Carrie’s partner, Ed.

As the story opens, Cady is struggling with amnesia and severe migraines—the result of something terrible that happened two summers before, which she can’t remember. She’s back on the island for the first time since the alleged accident happened, spending nearly all her time alone in one of the cabins, sometimes chatting there with her cousins and Gat. Conveniently, everyone is under strict orders not to tell Cady what happened to her: “You have to stop asking,” says Cady’s mom, Penny. “The doctors think it’s better if you remember on your own, anyway.” So, Cady spends the remainder of the book remembering past summers—mostly recalling how she and Gat gradually fell in love—as she tries to come to grips with the gaps in her memory.

A late revelation changes the story in fundamental ways and affects several characters. However, it all hinges on the fact that no one is willing to just have a straightforward conversation with Cady; afterwards, it becomes clear that the entire story is a house of cards—one that would come crashing down if just one character relented and said, OK, Cady, here’s what happened that summer…

It takes a long time to get to that point, though. Along the way, Cady dyes her hair black and composes thuddingly unsubtle fairy tales about the Sinclairs (“Once upon a time, there was a king who had three beautiful daughters. As he grew old, he began to wonder which should inherit the kingdom”), likens her hurt feelings to blood-gushing bullet wounds (“The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps to the porch”), and describes her cousins in poetically melodramatic ways: Mirren is “curiosity and rain”; Johnny is “effort and snark.” But the cousins never come across as fully developed characters—they’re just rich layabouts who roll their eyes whenever Gat, who’s slightly more self-aware, attempts to remind them that there are actual problems in the world. The teens are simply not very interesting people to spend time with for 250 pages—at least, until the end, when a secret about three of them makes them more compelling. (That said, it’s a twist that many readers will have encountered before, in another wildly popular story.)

It’s telling that the first season of the streaming-series adaptation, developed and co-written by The Vampire Diaries’ Julie Plec, spends a good deal of time with the kids’ parents, who are, at least, entertaining in their petty squabbles over who-will-get-what when Daddy dies. Sweetbitter’s Caitlin FitzGerald, in particular, as Penny, gives a pleasingly brittle performance, and David Morse, as the hardhearted Harris, is enjoyably smug. The most likable character in the series, though, is one that doesn’t appear in the book at all: Gat’s mother, Maya, played by The Irrational’s Karen David. She’s the only person who seems to have any awareness of how ridiculous the Sinclairs are; she memorably describes a contentious family gathering—in which she’s one of very few people of color—as “Knives Out meets Get Out shit.”

Unfortunately, Maya’s appearances are few and brief. Mostly, the show is made up of long stretches of narration by Cady (Gossip Girl’s Emily Alyn Lind), who spends an awful lot of time staring into space anxiously intoning such lines as “In her arrogance, she forgot the most important lesson of all: Revolution is bloody, and too often, it’s the innocent who fall.” High School’s Esther McGregor, as Mirren, delivers an appealingly energetic performance, and newcomer Shubham Maheshwari, as Gat, has an affable presence that sells the romance between Gat and Cady. Joseph Zada, soon to star in the upcoming film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping, plays Johnny, and he manages to bring some depth to an aggressively shallow character.

That’s a good thing, because he seems likely to appear in a second season, based on Lockhart’s Kirkus-starred 2022 prequel, Family of Liars. In that book, Johnny asks his mom, Carrie, to tell him “the absolute worst thing you ever did” when she was a teen. Refreshingly, she does something that no one in We Were Liars is allowed to do: She answers a simple question.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.