Character Clues
Character Analysis
Family Life
Trying to keep all the Sinclairs straight can be a bit of a challenge. Beechwood is like a cage full of perfect, blond hamsters that spend all their time pushing each other out of the way to have their turn at the wheel. They might take an occasional break to drink wine from that hanging bottle thing, but then they go right back to pushing.
Cadence, Johnny, and Mirren realize there's more to life than the wheel, but they're not sure how to make their moms see it. Except for Penny's obsessive notation of everything Cadence eats, there's not a whole lot of parenting going on. And the sisters in general are way too busy fighting over money to care about trivial things like their children's mental health.
Everyone's playing a role here—Harris is the king, the sisters are the princesses, and the Liars are the ladies-in-waiting. There's a reason Cadence writes fairytales in which either the king or the princesses come to a dastardly end: The only options if you're a Sinclair are winning or losing, inheritance or exile, favor or banishment. These aren't people who are content to split the ivory paperweights fair and square, and they won't hesitate to cut each other if that's what it takes to get it all. And how a character relates to this dynamic reveals a whole lot about them.
Location
There's no better way to build tension between characters than trapping them in an enclosed space. (Flannery O'Connor worked the heck out of that setup in A Good Man is Hard to Find.) By putting all her characters together on an island with only each other for company, Lockhart sets them up for a fight to the death.
The Sinclairs aren't trapped in a car or elevator or some other normal-people place, though; they're trapped on a lush, private island in opulent mansions. But is one opulent mansion enough for a Sinclair sister? Surely you jest.
Bess is the character with the most kids, which gives her the biggest sense of entitlement. Cadence says:
We all knew Aunt Bess wanted the Boston house. All the aunts wanted the Boston house. It was a four-million-dollar house, and they grew up in it. But Bess was the only one who lived nearby, and the only one with enough kids to fill the bedrooms. (37.26)
Bess also wants Windemere, Penny's Beechwood house, because Penny only has one child, Cadence. The fact that her marriage didn't go well and she didn't have as many kids as she planned means Penny is in danger of losing (one of) her home(s).
Family size plays a role in determining how much property each sister ends up with. As if a woman who wanted more children isn't already bummed enough about not having them, a Sinclair sister has the added bummer of standing to lose the property she considers her own. And just as how characters relate to family drama reveals who they are inside, so, too, does how they relate to the collected family property. Importantly, Cadence literally sets it on fire, making it crystal clear that she's not as enchanted by the homes as her mother and aunts are.
Physical Appearances
Let's get the surface stuff out of the way first: All the Sinclairs are blond and white, while Ed and Gat are Indian and dark. Right away, we have a rich/poor dynamic established, as well as a white elite with people of color eternally cast to the periphery.
When Cadence dyes her hair black, though, is when things get really interesting: "I know it's not important if our people came over on the Mayflower," she says. "It's not important to be tall. Or blond. That is why I dyed my hair: I don't want to be the eldest. Heiress to the island, the fortune, and the expectations" (19.33). She alters her appearance, in other words, to demonstrate her altered relationship with her family's beliefs.
Harris doesn't even recognize Cadence when he leaves the island and comes to Vermont for the first time in ages. But she finds certain things about him unrecognizable, too:
Granddad has lost weight since I saw him last. His white hair stands out in puffs around his ears, tufty; he looks like a baby bird. His skin is baggy on his frame, and he has a potbellied slump that's not how I remember him. (19.17)
He looks slightly less powerful and regal than she remembered. He is a little worse for the wear, and as the patriarch of the family, his slipping indicates the family's falling futures. They are not as rich as they once were.
Physical appearances also serve as an important clue to what really happened to the Liars during summer fifteen. When Cadence sees the Liars again for summer seventeen, they tell her how much she's changed, but she's surprised to see they haven't changed at all.
Gat hasn't grown, and he's wearing a beat-up t-shirt from two summers ago. As for Johnny, he's "in jeans and a pink plaid button-down so old its edges are frayed" (25.21). It's the kind of detail you skim past on the first read, then realize the significance of on the second: Of course they haven't grown or changed clothes—they're dead.