And so we enter the third circle of hell.

The prologue begins with some discouraging talk about unspecified people who have nine lives, and the worryingly ominous statement that “nothing in Rosewood is ever really over”. Not as long as the publisher is still signing the cheques anyway.

Our four privileged heroines are introduced holidaying in a Jamaican luxury paradise hotel, swimming in their designer bikinis and listening to “Redemption Song” played on steel drums, either to hint at the upcoming themes of enslavement and oppression or because it’s the only reggae song Sara Shepard knows. Although this prologue is for once not a flashback to events previously featured in the books we are still treated to many, many pages of plot reiteration, with the result that the whole section is more treading water than moving forward. Alison’s motives for her various crazy actions in the last few books are restated, but still remain a mystery to me. The girls are all aware that Alison “hated them with every ounce of her being”, even though her anger could surely be directed more logically toward her parents since it was they who accidentally shipped her to a mental institute twice even though she’s the “not-crazy” twin. Incidentally the phrase “not crazy” here means “crazy murderer”.

The developments which do occur are that Noel has been hanging around with Mike the sexist too much, regressing him to a level where the entirety of his conversation is merely rephrased demands for his girlfriend to take her clothes off. Hanna’s father is casually announced to be running for senate (Party not mentioned. I’m assuming Republican), Spencer is moaning about school and Emily keeps being sick, and is therefore probably pregnant. Then suddenly they all spot a girl with Freddy-Krueger-skin and an air of radiant beauty and confidence. It must be Ali! End of prologue.

Then onto the book proper, set 10 months later. Chapter 1 begins with someone shoving cheese into Spencer’s face, which is promising but sadly turns out to be a badly phrased description of serving hors-d’oeuvres rather than a vicious and messy assault. After this disappointment we are told that the girls are now no longer friends, since they are all vile bitches who can’t go 10 minute without turning on each other. Then the usual monotonous drone of brand-names begins. In amongst the white noise we pick up a few pieces of news: Melissa and Officer Wilden are now going out with each other, presumably because they were both left spare after the various deaths in the last cycle. This reminds me that we never cleared up who murdered Wilden’s Amish ex-girlfriend, to whom he was abusive. She wasn’t from Rosewood though, so nobody cares about her and her mysterious disappearance, least-of-all her ex. Meanwhile Melissa’s completely redoing her kitchen as a means of passing the time, and has used her rich-cow contacts to get Wilden a cushy job in a museum, since it’s closer to her “luxuriously renovated townhouse” and therefore more convenient for her. I sincerely hope she ends up trapped in a cupboard with a corpse again by the end of this book. She’s certainly asking for it. Also Spencer has got into Princeton because she gets everything she wants and both the Hastings parents have got new partners already, because no one is ever single in these books for more than 2 hours. And Wilden is curious about why Spencer and Emily are no longer friends, but cannot be told because the answer pertains to the Jamaica Incident (JI), which we the readers cannot hear about yet because it’s the thrilling finale reveal.

Meanwhile Emily is working as a coat check girl at her friend’s party, which no-one thinks is a bit off, and has quit the swim team for reasons we cannot hear about related to the JI. Which means, as stated in my previous review, that her only characteristic is her part-time lesbianism. With this is mind she immediately meets a new love interest who offers (roughly five minutes after they meet) to solve Emily’s problem of not having earned a university scholarship by simply getting Daddy to fix things, Daddy being a rich man who has bought favour with a university. It’s certainly nice to have influential friends. In other news Emily now had a “silky tassel” talisman, which sounds very peculiar but can’t be explained because of JI.

Hanna’s life is still mainly dull sibling rivalry, plus her father’s senate bid, an offer of a modelling contract and, of course, thinking about JI. Aria is not having sex with her boyfriend, which he is not taking well, although considering he’s the kind of boy who calls his girlfriend “woman” he was never likely to be the considerate type. We also learn that she never had sex with Ezra Fitz, which is news to me. Noel is distracted from his attempts at soliciting sex when he has to go and collect the new Finnish exchange student who will be staying with him, which he does whilst making many racist jests about Finnish culture which are limited only by the fact that he knows nothing about Finland, and in fact has it slightly confused with Holland. But it’s all Europe, so what’s the difference? Aria finds all this hilarious even though she lived in Iceland for 3 years and is supposedly cosmopolitan, but is horrified to find that the exchange student is a gorgeous Nordic blonde racial stereotype and is instantly aflame with jealousy. Aria is an awful person and her life is ridiculous. Also, don’t forget the JI.

Everything proceeds exactly as you would imagine. Spencer meets her mother’s new boyfriend Mr Pennythistle, who is inexplicably horrible to her without being questioned by her family, thus precipitating a sulk. Then she encounters a boy who meets her approval on the basis that “prepster was her favorite look.”, they bond over their love of sports, money and idiocy, he calls her hot, and then in a shocking twist he turns out to be Master Pennythistle! Hanna is disappointed in Mike for not being more sympathetic about her Daddy Issues, even though she is surely well aware that he has all the sensitivity of a copy of Nuts magazine. He also refuses to allow her to do any modelling, so she promptly dumps him. Again. I’m very much at a loss as to which of them is most vile. Emily continues to hang around with her new love interest Chloe, who totes her baby sister about the place presumably in order to make Emily feel guilty. Surprisingly Emily actually gets a storyline of her own, although it’s only the hand-me-down older-male-molester storyline that all the other girls have already had a turn with. This time the perpetrator is Chloe’s father, but it doesn’t really make much of a difference because the whole story always runs in exactly the same way, and is consistently irrelevant.

Meanwhile we are reminded almost constantly about the JI. There are also many mentions of the new PLL film, as well as repeated instances of people spotting Alison in the corner of their eye, in an old photograph, on TV etc., exactly as in every other book. The label-obsession steadily worsens, as we are told the brand names of candles and computer-game cars. We are also gradually drip-fed JI-related flashbacks, mainly regarding how everyone was immediately frightened of Tabitha the burnt girl, but how they non-the-less managed to split up and wander aimlessly about until each one of them had had an individual chance to meet up with her alone and be spooked by her doing nothing. Meanwhile the present-day plot-strand continues as usual, with vague threats from ‘A’#3 running alongside the standard individual plots. Mr. Roland’s harassment of Emily is made easier by the fact that Rosewood Day is quite happy to allow parents to videotape children to whom they are not related in their swimwear. Klaudia the exchange student makes friends with Aria, apparently because she’s the only person who doesn’t think of people from Finland as comedy caveman-Vikings. Spencer and her new boyfriend go to the Kahn’s Racist Finn-Welcoming Party and casually discuss how one of the women present is a predatory paedophile, but no one seems bothered about it. Hanna continues to be a narcissistic bitch, yet we are supposed to be worried about ‘A’#3’s potential threat to her irritatingly perfect life. Aria realises that like all girls in this series Klaudia is a man-hungry vacuum who wants to steal her boyfriend. Spencer’s new boyfriend turns out to be gay, which she immediately happily accepts, thereby rendering the storyline moot. Emily’s new girlfriend tells her that she used to have a sexual relationship with her teacher, which I’m pretty sure was Aria’s storyline first. Emily insists on droning on about Alison (technically Courtney) being the love of her life, even though they only actually knew each other as children. She also finally admits the baby thing, and immediately thereafter is sexually assaulted by Mr.Roland and blamed for the assault by ‘A’#3, the proximity of these events creating a very unpleasant atmosphere of judgement against Emily for her transgression in being impregnated. The actual fate of the baby is also left hanging, as Shepard would rather drone on about the blackmail business some more, even though ‘A’#3 has absolutely nothing to say.

After a lot of dullness Hanna’s photographer friend decides to blackmail her in return for some photographs of her with her bra very-slightly showing which would apparently ruin her dad’s campaign for senate if they got out. He also attempts to rape her for good measure, but this is quickly brushed aside. It’s hard to get particularly excited about this plot since all 4 of the girls already have a constant string of blackmailers after them throughout the series. Meanwhile Aria decides to sleep with her boyfriend to stop him cheating on her and Emily refrains from telling anyone about the adult male who sexually assaulted her in case she is somehow blamed. The sexual politics of this book leave summat to be desired, to be honest.

In other news, Spencer is delighted to have a gay friend since due to his sexual preferences he will be delighted to watch “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” with her and “argue over Robert Pattinson’s hotness”, surely a very brief argument? Then there’s a make-over sequence, after which Zach decides that he might not be gay after all. None of this constitutes an actual story. Also Chloe turns out to have had an alcohol problem in the past, although unlike most teens it relates to champagne rather than alcopops and cider, Hanna steals some money from her father’s campaign fund rather than selling any of her myriad luxury possessions, because she is a selfish idiot, and Aria screams and runs away at the sight of a naked girl, for what reason I do not know.

Whilst Spencer is occupied letting her step-brother-to-be use her body as a sexual test ground with which to determine his preferences Emily is once more sexually assaulted by the father of her new love-interest, who naturally catches them in the act and yet more naturally assumes that it’s Emily’s fault. Hanna is occupied with framing her dad’s assistant Jeremiah for the theft she committed, a cruelty he has earned by not liking her because she is a bitch. She is repaid for this almost immediately when TabAli apparently manages to trap her in a darkened lift using her hitherto-unmentioned electrician’s skills, sneak into said lift after disabling the emergency lighting and whisper vaguely sinister nonsense to her before escaping unseen. This makes no sense whatsoever. Meanwhile Aria finally recalls the exciting secret of JI – the girls pushed TabAli off a roof and presumed that they had killed her, although doubtless she will rise again as standard, especially since her body managed to dematerialise as soon as no eyes were upon it, in classic Michael Myers manner. I don’t know why this is supposed to be an exciting reveal as the girls all evidently believe TabAli is dead, and would had to have thought so for the current plot to make sense. Where else would they suppose her to be? It was obviously a shock to Aria though, as the mere memory of it causes her to push Klaudia off a ski-lift to her potential death. Luckily Klaudia had revealed herself seconds before to be an evil psychopathic manipulator, thereby validating Aria’s ridiculous jealousy and rendering herself a viable target for serious physical injury. I assume we’ll see her again by the end of the book, alive but in plaster.

As we near the end Spencer inflicts yet another ridiculous Alighost dream upon us, before getting tangled up in some histrionics involving the Pennythistle family and their over-reaction to Zach possibly being gay. Aria lies to her boyfriend about the accident with Klaudia. Hanna suddenly realises that they should just tell the police about everything, since all they’re guilty of is pushing a girl who’s known to be an insane stalker and murderer. Nobody actually tells the police. Emily contributes nowt, as usual. Then news conveniently comes in that a girl’s body has washed ashore in Jamaica. Is it Alison this time? Or perhaps another identical psychotic sibling whose corpse has ended up where she should be due to a chain of unbelievable and ill-planned events? No, it turns out that it’s merely Tabitha, an innocent girl with a tragic backstory whom our four Pretty Little Idiots mistook for Alison Reborn. Or wait…. Maybe it actually WAS Alison. No, no it wasn’t. Or was it? And if Alison is dead then who is ‘A’#3, the mysterious figure who knows all their secrets and has exactly the same writing style as both Alison and the long-forgotten Mona. There’s no point in me paying attention to anything the characters say, since they are entirely unreliable and totally ignorant. Similarly, there’s no point in me scouring the plot for clues, since Shepard is a stranger to foreshadowing and plot-structure and will no doubt pull the eventual answer out of nowhere 3 books from now. So I guess I’ll just plough on until she finally puts me out of my misery.

Most Racially Insensitive “Rich White Kid” Behaviour”
At a restaurant table in Jamaica:

“everyone clinked glasses and said “Yeah, mon!” in faux-Jamaican accents.”

This is presumably in earshot of numerous Jamaican staff of the hotel-restaurant. Although I can’t verify this, since staff are too lowly to feature in the narrative, I’m pretty sure the drinks didn’t just materialise in their hands.
Or Aria’s summary of a Japanese exchange student:

she wrote her name in strange characters, folded origami shapes out of her spelling tests, and had the straightest, blackest hair Aria had ever seen.

Imagine other cultures having different alphabets! And of course all Japanese people start doing origami whenever paper is within their grasp. As to the hair thing, it worries me what type of sheltered life the supposedly travelled Aria has been leading if this impresses her..
Or then there’s the ever-charming Mike’s:

“I bet Klaudia walks around the house naked 24/7. I heard Finns do that. They’re huge sex addicts, too—there’s nothing else to do there.”

Obviously his 3 years living in a Nordic country have in no way broadened his horizons or deepened his understanding of other cultures.

Stupidest Names
Nicholas Pennythistle
Zachary Pennythistle
Amelia Pennythistle
Thaddeus
Kelsey (female)
Brice Langley
Lola
Klaudia Huusko
Preston Wallis
Beau Baxter (male)
Lori, Kendra & Madison
Maurizio

Least Comprehension of the Concept of Irony

“Ironically, Spencer was the only person in her family not dating”

What’s ironic about that? It’s possibly annoying if you’re Spencer, or amusing if you hate Spencer or uninteresting if you are a reader of this book, but not ironic.

Most Charming nickname

“Jeremiah, Mr. Marin’s number-one campaign advisor—or, as Hanna liked to call him, his bitch boy”

I wonder if it ever occurs to Hanna that there’s a reason people don’t like her?

Most Slavishly Devoted Attitude to a Boy

“Mike gave his opinion by belching loudly during one of the takes. Hanna adored him for it.”

She certainly doesn’t ask for much from a man.

Worst Tourist
Noel in Iceland:

“He’d insisted on only eating at Burger King and paying for cans of Budweiser with U.S. dollars.”

Least Appealing Foodstuff

“raw turnip ravioli”

Most Airheadedly Judgemental Remark Related to Sexuality
“What gay guy hated shopping?”

This book has a particularly lazy story-structure, all events and relationships simply regressing to where they were at book one in order that Shepard can simply write the same story again: Four once close friends, now estranged, a big secret between them related to Alison which most now be dragged out incessantly. It’s so pathetically lacking in effort that I could just as well have re-read the first book and changed some of the brand names. I’m sure it’s made Shepard yet richer though. Well done Sara. I hope you’re proud of yourself.

Back we go again.

As the timeline of events starts to make less and less sense this volume’s prologue is set in the middle of the story, somewhere between the JI and the events of the last book so far as I can make out. Its contents are a reminder of Aria and Hanna’s trip to Iceland, during which we have already been told there will be an incident (hereafter the II) which will eventually be revealed to us at one of the various artificial dénouements of the series. Emily is pregnant with the baby we already knew she had and Spencer has some problem related to buying study-aid drugs, falls for the standard ‘your friend is in the other room telling us everything’ TV-cop interrogation trick and sets her friend up as a drug dealer in order to take the heat off herself. Just to remind you, she is one of the series’ heroines.

And so to the present. Emily is busy moping about wearing the pants she stole from AliCourt 4½ years ago like the crazy obsessive she is, staring at the poster of Michael Phelps which has reappeared again regardless of continuity and returned to her wall. The sulk is broken temporarily when her sister Beth turns up, but since she is completely indistinguishable from her sister Carolyn I doubt it will make too much difference. Spencer is now living with her violent patriarchal stepfather-to-be and his daughter Amelia, who quite reasonably hates Spencer for getting her brother sent to military school and bullying her mercilessly. Spencer in turn cannot get on with Amelia because she is a girl, and worse yet not even stylish. Also, she might not have got into Princeton after all because of some stupid candidate mix-up, so we’ll have to hear her obsessing over that yet again. Other events include Aria being dumped by her awful for boyfriend for being pathetic and unpleasant, which is hard to care greatly about, and Hanna confessing to her father all the terrible secrets she was keeping from him, which formed a major part of the previous book. It turns out that he completely forgives her, since stealing $10,000 and framing an innocent man are matters of little consequence, and a fair portion of the last book is now even more pointless than previously.

It turns out that Emily’s new sister Beth is a scandalous “risk-taker”, as evidence by her listening to L’il Kim and having a boyfriend. She and Emily attend a monster-themed fancy-dress party as the Statue of Liberty and a flapper, for some reason, and Emily immediately meets a new love-interest called Kay, who is dressed as a mermaid. We also learn that Shepard considers Supergirl, Mexicans and Native Americans to be monsters. Spencer meanwhile is busy with the school play we have been hearing about for some time, in which she is risibly cast as Lady Macbeth alongside new student and motorcycle bad-boy Beau. The skinny-jean-clad Weird Sisters are played by the girls’ enemy clique, since casting has to mirror the school’s internal politics exactly. Also they only have roughly 8 students in the entire year-group (10 if you count Alison incarnations), so the choice is limited. Aria pauses in hypocritically bemoaning how “the bimbos of the world always got the guys” to get back in touch with her teacher-ex Ezra on a casual whim, hoping to make her more recent ex jealous. And Hanna gets involved in a cynical ploy to manipulate a bunch of apolitical teens into appearing to be rallying in support of her father’s senate bid, but is swiftly distracted by a boy called Liam, with whom she finds herself up against an alleyway wall quite literally 5 minutes after they meet.

On the strength of a single text casually asking how he is, Exra turns up on Aria’s lawn with a hand-painted sign reading “I MISSED YOU, ARIA!” and a luxury picnic, thus reminding us he is a weird stalker-pervert type. He also excuses his total disappearance from the narrative since Book 4 by explaining that his e-mails were hacked a year ago, and thus he has been unable to contact anyone. This in no way distracts from Shepard’s abysmal attempt to disguise her straw-grabbing desperation for plots but Aria is happy enough, and is rolling around half-naked in a field with him a couple of hours later. Emily’s romance with yet another girl blossoms as usual, raising the question of why in Book 1 she was so concerned about being gay since every female she meets seems to be at least bisexual, as well as conveniently attracted to her. We don’t hear about her going any further than the casual kissing stage though, because Shepard is a little bit afraid of lesbians. Spencer is a the only one without an instant partner as she is distracted by the return of Kelsey, the girl she framed for drug-dealing, who coincidentally turns out to be in Amelia’s “Charity Chamber Music Group”, whatever that might be. We also hear a little more about the drug in question, an imaginary and stupid magical study-drug called “Easy-A” which is pushed on both girls by a random boy at a bar and which they take for 6 weeks before being caught by the police, which is easily the least realistic and most dull drug storyline I have ever read. It’s quite the big deal for the characters though, as no one in Rosewood has ever taken any drugs before despite the fact they’re all super-rich dimwits with no sense of consequences. Somewhere along the way we are instructed that this round’s suspects for A include Kelsey, a particularly obvious red herring, and Kate(again).

Eventually it turns out that Kay and Kelsey are the same person, and all four girls decide that she therefore is probably ‘A’, logic not being their strong suit, although to be fair it would fit with Emily’s propensity to be attracted to psychopaths. Nobody does much about this though. Instead Hanna nearly goes on holiday with the sex-focused strange boy she has only met once before realising in a tedious plot twist that he is the son of her father’s rival for senate, in a tired and inconsequential [b:Romeo and Juliet|18135|Romeo and Juliet|William Shakespeare|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327872146s/18135.jpg|3349450] steal. Sticking with the Shakespeare, Spencer attends an astoundingly cliché-ridden coaching session to prepare her for her part in [b:Macbeth|8852|Macbeth|William Shakespeare|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327866505s/8852.jpg|1896522], where she realises several hundred pages after the rest of us that she is going to get involved with her co-star Beau. It takes a little while, but eventually after berating her for 20 minutes he tells her that he thinks her acting is “good” and she melts and throws herself into his arms. And Emily continues chastely dating Kelsey, because she never takes any action or does anything.

Aria’s love-life takes a yet more stupid turn when it turns out that Ezra has written a novel about her and their illegal fling of last year. Here the phrase “written a novel” means “copied down every dull chat he and Aria have ever had, and bulked it out with diatribes asserting his own personal philosophical opinions”. It sounds truly awful. Rather than finding it intensely creepy or demanding some of the potential royalties since a massive amount of the text is simply culled from her conversation, Aria is delighted – attention from others can only be positive, especially if it includes prurient physical flattery. Hanna’s star-crossed lovers act drags on, as Liam becomes increasingly desperate to drag her to a series of far-flung locations on the spur of the moment. Spencer’s love for Beau has now endowed her with magical subconscious thespian abilities. Aria finishes Ezra’s book, which ends with the pseudo-Ezra lead character being suddenly killed by anthrax spores mailed to him by an “unknown international terrorist”. I hope this is some sort of satire I’m not quite getting. Aria also raises some minor questions about the book but this immediately offends Ezra’s pride and he commences to sulk, paying Aria back for her temerity in failing to unquestioningly adore him by flirting with her arch nemesis and giving away the secret-filled manuscript about her love-life.

The usual mid-book lull occurs, as Shepard tries to fill pages ahead of this episode’s conclusion. Shepard continues to misunderstand the concept of irony. Everyone persists in wearing “booties”, which is confusing as to me that means knitted baby shoes, we are treated to constant reminders of Isabel’s orange skin, Kate’s “Jo Malone Fig and Cassis body lotion”, Alison’s vanilla soap, the product-based smell of every boy in the series, etc. The media reports the Tabitha case incessantly, as presumably there is no other news in America. Hanna shifts focus from fake suspect one (Kelsey) to fake suspect 2 (Kate) for no particular reason. Spencer reminds us that Kelsey is her preferred bet. Emily does absolutely nothing. Mike the Pervert takes one of his girlfriends to an underwear runway show, which sounds romantic, although for some reason he expects to see many pairs of “Double Dees” even though most models don’t have enough flesh on their whole body to fill an AA-cup. The girls get together and decide once again that actually they prefer Kelsey as a suspect, with Emily as the inevitable lone voice of dissent. Emily is pushed down a hill by someone who she thinks was Alison, although given that she is clinically obsessed with Alison that’s not particularly surprising. Spencer rehearses for Macbeth by chanting “Out, damned spot!” over-and-over-again until she has some kind of fit, conjuring up pills stuck to her hands and dead girls haunting her, and throws herself into an icy brook. Directly afterward Hanna has one of her dream-visions of Alighost, this time in Kelsey’s room at university for some reason, before letting Liam climb up to her bedroom via her new plot-enforced Juliet balcony. Aria upsets Ezra by implying that his unpublished ramblings might possibly not necessarily be a “literary masterpiece”.

Eventually The Scottish Play is ready for its single performance. Spencer totally loses her inability to act due to stress, leading the director to actually threaten to change her for another actress between mid-play, despite that being shockingly stupid. Then she suddenly remembers how to act again, is amazing, and is rewarded with yet another kiss from Beau. The 2/3 party this time is a post-performance cast gathering, which most of the girls attend even though they were nothing to do with the play. At the do Emily tells Kelsey about Spencer framing her. Aria is uncomfortable being stalked by an ex-teacher at a school event, so Ezra descends into yet another sulk and gets off with evil pneumatic sex-puppet Klaudia behind some bins in an alleyway. Spencer mistakenly thinks Kelsey is trying to kill her and reasonably tries to strangle her to death with her bare hands. She escapes without legal ramifications, despite the numerous witnesses, because everyone agrees it’s obviously caused by the play having temporarily “taken over her mind”.

We then return to the victim-trapped-in-car-with-potential-killer storyline again, but this time with Emily and Kelsey in the respective roles. The other girls race after them with their usual disregard for road-safety and innocent bystanders, and everyone ends up once again at Floating Man Quarry, death-site of A#1 all the way back in Book 4. Kelsey drones on-and-on about secrets and bad deeds without naming any specifics before deciding to jump from the quarry and kill herself. She is then saved by Spencer, but commences to OD on her stupid fictional speed pills in a manner both oddly-timed and untenable. The usual convenient ambulance arrives and she is borne away, leaving the four girls behind to discuss with relief how no-one will ever believe her supposed murder-accusations, since she is now a known drug user and everything she says will be written off as substance-induced -hallucinations. So it’s a happy ending except for that photograph of Tabitha’s dead body that Spencer received. We then veer off into some junk about Liam turning out to be a cheat and Hanna wreaking her vengeance by telling her father all the juicy gossip about Liam’s father that he revealed to her for some unknown reason, thereby turning a supposedly democratic election process into the offshoot of a teenage love-spat. This has no place this near to the end of the book and serves only to reduce what little tension or narrative thrust there was. Another plot lurch leads to a passing mention to a new forensic procedure which will prove that the body on the beach was in fact Tabitha, even though that has never previously been in doubt. The II is also brought up again, in readiness for the next book. Aria realises that she prefers mindless lump Noel to pretentious pseudo-intellectual Ezra, even though they’re both unreliable cheats, and gets back together with him. Spencer finds out that the whole stupid Princeton thing was just another trick from ‘A’#3, and she has wasted our time going on about it.

Finally all four girls go to visit Kelsey in the Preserve, the nearby mental institute which operates a drop-in policy for random teenagers but also imprisoned Alison for 3½ years in total secrecy. Kelsey is now a classic TV-movie lunatic, all matted hair and circles under the eyes. She now admits that she had drugs in her room anyway the night when Spencer planted some there, and so apparently totally deserved to go to jail and have her life ruined. Although Spencer seems to have escaped that judgement. In other news she quite blatantly wasn’t ‘A’#3 in any way, and the girls are all idiots. It then turns out that Tabitha was also at the Preserve, which is pretty crowded with identikit teenage girls, and was exactly the same age as Alison. This is significant for some reason. The Shepard had a quick boast in the acknowledgements about how “compelling and interesting” her own book series is. The end.

Most Racially Insensitive “Rich White Kid” Attitude
Hanna on Iceland:

“Was a country full of weird, pale Vikings who were all related to one another worthy of her Elizabeth and James high-heeled booties?”

Stupidest Names
Chaz
Bettina Bloom
Tucker Wilkinson (male)
Pierre Castle
Beau Braswell (male)
Phineas O’Connell
Velma
Ray LaMontagne
Ulysses
Farrin Jacobs
Shep and Mindy

Most Sympathetic Sentence in the Book

“Spencer couldn’t believe that she and her friends were yet again faced with the task of figuring out who A might be.”

I think we can all appreciate what she’s feeling.

Least Imaginative Comparison

“The mermaid’s eyes brightened. She reminded Emily of a sexier, green-haired version of Ariel from The Little Mermaid.”

A mermaid reminded Emily of a mermaid? Who would have thought it?

Weirdest Psychological Issue

“ “I recently broke up with someone, too,” Hanna said quietly, thinking of Mike, although now when she tried to imagine his face, all she could see was a big crayon scribble.”

Rosewood’s prosopagnosia has now struck Hanna it seems, albeit in a peculiarly localised form effecting only her memory of one individual.

Weirdest Ghost Story

“The church had once been a mansion that housed an older, wealthy railroad baron and his Olympic-team-in-training of male fencers. The railroad baron had gone crazy, murdered several of the fencers, and escaped to South America”

Sorry, what? This is just casually thrown in at the beginning of Chapter 17, and then never mentioned again. Is the US so full of giant mansions occupied by insane old men and their pet bevy of Olympic athletes that this needs no further explanation?

Least Realistic Sentence

“Liam sighed. “I pine for the time when my parents got along.” ”

Most Unlikely Outfit

“the sexiest fitted corduroys Spencer had ever seen on a guy.”

There’s something very weird about these books, which becomes more apparent as they drag on. All the female characters seem to be suffering from neurotic psychoses occasionally leading to catatonic fits, and all the males from narcissistic personality disorders of the megalomaniacal variety. Yet none of them are aware of this. Occasionally one of the girls like Mona, Alison or Courtney tries to take control of their situation by usurping the psychopathic control-freak tendencies of the males, becomes a crazed blood-stained lunatic and is destroyed as punishment for her transgression. Otherwise everybody trundles along like this is normality. Therefore this is either an incredibly clever series of books exploring the human condition and the gender imbalance, or a frightening glimpse into Sara Shepard’s fractured psyche.

Finally I reach what was promised to be the penultimate book of this series, only to find that Shepard has now extended the suffering yet again by promising more volumes. I’m beginning to think of PLL as a kind of Sisyphean torture, endlessly promising a release that will never come. The worst of it is that Shepard ran out of ideas roughly 6 books ago, so how she proposes to continue is beyond me.

One of Shepard’s methods of stringing out what little plot she has is to feed us one or two morsels of this volume’s story in the prologue, spread the rest out very thinly throughout the rest of the text whilst bulking the chapters out with inconsequential flimflam regarding outfits and stylish parties, and then finally throw the remainder of the details in our faces at the book’s conclusion before rushing out of the door with her latest cheque. Accordingly, in this prologue we learn that Emily was going to sell her baby to a rich woman called Gayle, (there is no mention of the morality of this) rather than just hand her over to the Social Services like normal people, but at the last minute decided that Gayle was a psycho for reasons we are not yet privy to. Therefore she involves her 3 sort-of-friends in a plot to steal the baby from the hospital and leave it on the doorstep of a nice family called the Bakers, thereby creating a convenient new enemy/suspect in Gayle. We know they are nice because they have a simple name and golden retrievers. We still don’t know what is wrong with normal adoption channels. There has also been no mention whatsoever of contraception, which could’ve saved everyone a lot of trouble.

Back to the present. Everything is as usual. Everyone is still very rich and there are still a lot of mentions of the TV-movie “Pretty Little Killer” for no reason that is apparent. Aria is still with Noel, which means a lot of bra-touching and whining. Klaudia is now with Ezra and they are apparently looking for flats to rent together, which seems a bit previous. Spencer’s mother is planning an extravagantly revolting luxury wedding, and Spencer’s stepfather-to-be hands her an audition with a play producer on a plate, because everything comes easily to rich bitches. On the same note we hear a lot about summat called “Eating Clubs” which Spencer may or may not join at Princeton, membership of which involves a process called “bicker”, hinges on you being a massive snob, and grants you the right to whichever of the top jobs takes your fancy. It’s basically like watching the conversation between Lord Snot and Miss Money-Sterling in the Young Ones episode “Bambi” except without the satire or humour. Meanwhile Hanna is now best friends with Kate, increasing the likelihood that she is ‘A’#3 quite considerably, and her father is still running for senate. It increasingly appears that there is going to be a full political-campaign storyline running through at least 4 books without any mention of a political party, which is pretty pathetic. Also, Hanna has now taken to saving some time by simply imagining what type of notes ‘A’#3 would send if they could be bothered. In a similar move, Emily re-reads hers in order that they can be re-used in the text, relieving Shepard from having to create any identical new blackmailish compositions. Other than that she doesn’t do much except find out by accident that the Bakers have moved away, which she finds very upsetting even though she couldn’t have cared less about the baby for the last 2 books. What makes her so confident that the authorities have allowed them to keep a baby they found dumped on their doorstep is not explained.

A lot of filler happens, undisguised by the repetitive writing. Everyone feels emotions ripple through their gut or burn in their stomach, or possibly feel like ping-pong balls in their stomach before said organ drops to their feet. There are a lot of descriptions of hair-colour, shoes and skirts. Aria talks on and on about how perfect Noel’s family are, thereby immediately cursing them with family problems; sadly the best Shepard can come up with is that Mr.Kahn is a cross-dresser who wanders around nearby supermarkets in his wife’s frocks. Spencer meets a Grateful-Dead-loving stoner cliché called Reefer, in a scene where political feeling is portrayed as a sort of embarrassing social disease which must be avoided at all costs. Hanna tries to seduce Mike in public because she is jealous that he has a new girlfriend, fails and deservedly makes a fool out of herself. We learn that the local gym now offers pole dancing lessons which are fully viewable to the testosterone-fuelled clientele, all of whom watch with impunity whilst teen girls gyrate in public. Meanwhile Emily bumps into Isaac and suddenly realises that she should’ve been through that whole “should I tell my baby’s father that I’m pregnant?” question a year or so earlier. She’s distracted from this pretty quickly when she realises that in one of those PLL coincidences that drive most of the plotting Mr.Marin’s new campaign donor is Gayle the Psycho of the prologue. Immediately afterward the girls have one of their usual conflabs and decide that Gayle must be ‘A’#3, which conclusively proves that she isn’t. Emily does, to her credit, attempt to point out that their deductions make no sense, but is roundly ignored since they have the highly-incriminatory evidence that Spencer saw Gayle in a cake shop last week. After all, why would Gayle be in a cake shop unless she was the crazy blackmailer that knows all their secrets and has been stalking them obsessively for months?

More nothing happens. Aria continues to dwell on the drag issue, extrapolating that since Mr.Khan was wearing a frock he doesn’t love his wife any more, or panicking that ‘A’#3 might find out even though there is exactly no blackmail potential in the matter whatsoever as far as Aria is concerned. We hear a little about Emily’s difficult decision regarding whether her baby’s primary need is love or money. Since this is obvious and we already know the outcome it doesn’t make for very exciting reading. We also learn that Gayle has recently lost a child, which is important for cod-psychology reasons of a “Hand That Rocks the Cradle” standard. Hanna attends a pole-dancing class to impress Mike, and it’s supposed credentials as genuine exercise rather than titillation are somewhat tested by the fact that she is allowed to join the class straight off the street, wearing stripper make-up and super-high silver high-heels. The whole sequence is both appalling and ridiculous, with both Hanna and Colleen delighted to be leered over by all the nearby teen boys as they dance to “Hot Stuff” (The Full Monty being Shepard’s only reference stripper-wise) and the whole thing culminating in Hanna’s pièce de résistance, a slight flash of the very edge of her red bra, which drives all the boys there insane with lust due to the intense bra-fetishism which pervades Rosewood. To create a contrast with this scene Emily goes to church and confesses her child-bearing supposed-sins. It doesn’t help. We hear a little more about Gayle’s child who had an accident when she was young before dying recently, but Emily forms no suspicions about who the mysterious dead child might be. Also, there’s some business about one of the Alisons calling Meredith 5 years ago to ask her about a lot of stuff which is now over-and-done-with and was dull even when it was happening 10 books ago. Why is it being brought up now? I have no idea.

A lot of stuff too dull to write about occurs. ‘A’#3 gets a girl Spencer vaguely knows arrested for drug-possession in a highly unlikely manner, the police responding within minutes to a tip-off that a student girl may have some marijuana. People continue to say “über” a lot. Hanna is astounded when Mike gest annoyed at her calling his girlfriend a slut to her face. Aria is threatened by ‘A’#3 with the public display of a photo of Mr.Kahn in drag, to be released if she doesn’t break up with Noel. This seems very much not her problem to me, but she takes it fairly seriously. Emily remains convinced that Alison has/had supernatural power and is/was essentially omniscient , which is how she achieves/achieved the blackmail business. To be fair, it is hard to see how ‘A’#3s is managing without telepathy and teleportation powers at the bare minimum, so maybe she’s onto summat. Hanna buys some camouflage gear, a “field-scope”, night-vision goggles and a military helmet in order to spy on Colleen, because she is absolutely demented. However it doesn’t occur to her, even though she’s on a covert operation, to turn her phone on to silent.

After some prevarication the girls decide to steal Gayle’s phone in order to prove that she’s ‘A’#3, even though there have been numerous times in the series when someone has pointed out that one of the various ‘A’s probably or definitely has a second phone for blackmail purposes and that therefore their original phone is no evidence whatsoever of anything. However all of this has slipped the girls’ minds, for some reason. In the meantime Spencer buys some pot from Reefer to impress some cool kids, decides she fancies him but then pretends not too, as she does with all rich young males who come within a 50-foot radius of her. Emily meets her completely characterless friend Derrick, who exists merely to be the other half of her conversations during the period when she was in hiding due to the baby business, and then later hang about knowing her secrets and therefore being suspicious. Aria actually dumps Noel even there is no need to, because she is ridiculous. A party descends into a bacchanalian orgy due to the effects of a single tray of space cakes. Hanna finds out that Colleen was in an advert for laxatives, and decides to use this fact to bully her mercilessly in revenge for the absolutely nothing that Colleen has done to her.

Eventually we reach the 2/3 party, in this case the Marin fundraiser at which the girls plan to pointlessly steal Gayle’s phone. Spencer however fails to make it as she is suddenly in hospital, having apparently overdosed on a mix of weed, Ritalin and LSD, a bizarre combination that ‘A’#3 apparently managed to sneak to the whole party via means that are not explained. She also sees Teresa, or a vision or Teresa, or some nonsense. Meanwhile Hanna is delayed deciding not to bully Colleen after all, and is immediately rewarded by being made a figure of fun by ‘A’#3, which to be fair she deserves. Then ‘A’#3 claims to have kidnapped Emily’s baby, causing Emily, Hanna and Aria to panic and run about like idiots for a while before falling into ‘A’#3’s trap and going to Gayle’s house. There they eventually discover that Gayle’s mystery dead daughter is Tabitha, the mystery dead girl they’re all obsessed with. Whilst this is incredibly obvious it does raise the question of how the girls can have been following all the Tabitha-based news stories for months without picking up a single clue about her much-mentioned her bereaved mother.

But there’s no time for answers or sense. Instead Gayle is suddenly found dead, her usefulness as a red herring at an end, and the girls are apparently to be framed for her murder despite the complete lack of motive or logic. Spencer is included in this as she abruptly turns up at the crime-scene, having presumably recovered from the never-again-mentioned overdose. Everyone trots off to the police station, where we find out that Gayle was actually Tabitha’s step-mother. This apparently explains why she wasn’t in any of the news reports, although I don’t know how it does so. Eventually the girls realise with shock that they were once more totally wrong about the identity of A, and go home. Luckily Spencer’s father turns out to be old friends with the father of investigating officer Lowry, and so there are no legal ramifications for the girls to face and they walk away consequence-free as usual. The events of the book are then negated as Aria and Noel get back together, since their breaking –up made no sense, Hanna and Mike get back together, since he finds being stalked flattering, and Spencer sorts her Princeton problem out by a combination of blackmail and realising that she isn’t actually arsed anyway, and has been wasting everyone’s time for this entire book. Also she fancies Reefer apparently, which means she’ll be going out with him 10 minutes from now. Finally Emily is probably back with Isaac and it turns out that her baby was safe all along, in exactly the place she was supposed to be. Conclusion, everyone lives happily ever after because they all have money and boyfriends, and none of the stuff that happened in the book was important anyway. Except for all the dead people, and who cares about them?

As the book ends the girls attend Gayle’s funeral, which seems in bad taste, at which it is announced that Tabitha’s autopsy is back and she in fact died not from alcohol but from murder!! This isn’t actually how autopsies work, but never mind. Then ‘A’#3 reminds them that all the crap from the beginning of the book is still happening, before rushing unseen from the church whilst giggling psychotically. The end.

Stupidest Names
Patrice
Kerri Randolph
Colleen Bebris
Harper Essex-Pembroke
Tansy Gates
Raif Fredricks (a.k.a Reefer)
Madame Richeau
Trixie the Pole Dance Instructor
Willow
Quinn
Jessie Pratt
Professor Dinkins
Jeffrey Labrecque
Fletch Huxley
Nanette Ulster

Most Ridiculous Local Shops
The “artisanal cheese shop Quel Fromage!”
Or
“The Pump, a musclehead gym”

Most Noticeable Plot-Holes and Nonsense
Either:

“Hanna’s eyes widened. How did Colleen know Liam was a player?”

Because it was published in a national magazine? Considering that’s actually how Hanna found out, you’d think it would’ve made more of an impression on her.
Or Aria’s:

“Whoa. What if Tabitha’s family and friends somehow found out Tabitha hadn’t died from an alcohol overdose?”

Falling from a cliff and “alcohol overdose” are not the same thing, and don’t show up all that similarly in a post-mortem. Surely Tabitha is supposed to have died from falling off a cliff whilst drunk? At least that would half-way make sense.

Oddest Sounding Food
heirloom tomatoes
So… these are preserved and handed down from generation to generation before eventually being made available in the local supermarket?

Worst Yuletide Effort

“Emily hadn’t been to this mall since two Christmases ago, when she’d agreed to be the mall’s Santa.”

So Father Christmas was played by a skinny 16-year-old girl? Doesn’t sound like ideal casting to me.

Most Juvenile Sense of Humour

Mike wandered over to a table of satin bras, held an enormous pink one to his chest, and started striking exaggerated poses. Hanna snickered. Mike
used to do that all the time when they went shopping together, and it never failed to crack her up

I could understand it if cracked her up once. When she was drunk. But how funny can a girl find a bra? Incidentally, there’s a lot of bras in this book. Even more than usual, which is saying a lot.

Most Boastful Character Assessment
Aria on ‘A’#3:

“Whoever they were dealing with was diabolical and brilliant.”

I think Shepard is slightly over-estimating her own plotting-skills here.

Not only does it now seem that the 12th book won’t be the last, but the afterword to this book promises that it will take place on a cruise-ship as all the characters return to the scene of the JI for reasons of massive stupidity. Having informed me of this, Shepard concludes her witterings with the verbal equivalent of a slap in the reader’s face: actually writing “Anchors aweigh!” I could not be less excited about the upcoming publication of her latest money-spinning pile of vacuousity. Yet it rolls inexorably nearer, an unrelenting spectre of materialism, vanity and inanity.