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Cadence Sinclair is an unreliable narrator, a fact she acknowledges as integral to being a Sinclair. The reader is therefore on alert not to take her account of the facts at face value and should be ready to interpret her portrayal of characters and events, even herself, cautiously and independently. She is arguably the least reliable in the way she depicts herself. She insists, then regularly undermines that insistence, that she is on a search for the truth, when most of the book seems to demonstrate her attempts not to face reality. She sees, for better and worse, the idyllic vacation world of Beechwood Island as her real home, ignoring the fact that life consists of the day to day. Even her grand tour of Europe is a disappointment because she’s not on her island with her people.
Like Harris, Cadence considers the people she loves to be hers, which is one of the reasons that she prefers to be on Beechwood Island. Off island, Cadence would have to confront the reality of the Liars’ lives, including all of the other people who have claims on them. She would have to share, a trait at which she is not adept. Like the rest of the Sinclairs, Cadence is obsessed with possessions. Her exacting log of what she gives away, and when, and to whom reveals the project to be an obsession and not the purge she claims. In it, she reveals her similarity to her grandfather who spends most of his retirement deciding how he will bequeath his fortune.
Cadence’s selfishness demonstrates her immaturity. Much of what happens around Cadence seems to be beyond her understanding: her family’s prejudice, her mother’s watchful eye, the extent of her privilege, or the Liars’ cryptic messages. This failure of the imagination is on its fullest display during her reimagined fairytales. Cadence understands just enough about storytelling to know that the merchant will always view the beast as beastly or that the king and not the dragon is responsible for the deaths of the princesses. But for most of the novel, she fails to see her own complicity, symbolized in the fairytales by the ways that the princesses either acquiesce or rebel, when a third option is available: compromise.
