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PRETTY LITTLE LIARS
by Sara Shepard
Reviewed by Belinda Williams
Hardcover
HarperTeen
Fiction
ISBN-10: 0060887303
ISBN-13: 978006088730
304 pages

Author Biography | Review | Excerpt
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-- ABOUT THE BOOK --

Beautiful Girls. Scandolous Secrets. Outrageous Lies.

Gossip thrives amid the Mercedes-Benzes, mega-mansions, and perfectly manicured hedges in the exclusive town of Rosewood, Pennsylvania. Behind their Gucci sunglasses, beneath their perfectly pressed Polos, everyone has something to hide, especially high school juniors Spencer, Aria, Emily, and Hanna. Spencer covets her sister's gorgeous new boyfriend. Aria is having an affair with her English teacher. Emily is infatuated with the new girl at school. And Hanna is using some ugly tricks to stay beautiful. Deeper and darker still is a horrible secret the girls have shared since sixth grade --- a secret they thought was safe forever.

Then the girls start receiving threatening messages signed by someone named "A." Could "A" be Alison, the ultra-popular girl who disappeared three years earlier? Alison was their best friend. She knew everything about them. But if Alison isn't "A," who is? And how could anyone else know so much about the bad girls they were --- and the bad girls they've become? Suddenly their secrets --- the big ones, the little ones, even the long-buried ones --- no longer seem so secret. Suddenly nothing is safe in Rosewood.

-- AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY --

Sara Shepard graduated rom New York University and has an MFA rom Brooklyn College. She currently lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband. PRETTY LITTLE LIARS was inspired by her upbringing in Philadelphia's Main Line.

-- REVIEW --

Alison is perfect --- beautiful, witty, smart and popular. The girls want to be her, and the boys want to kiss her. Alison is a best friend, in more ways than one. But things are not always as they seem. Hanna is a nice person, just a little overweight. Steadily putting on the pounds since her parents divorced, Hanna is having her own time of coping with things. Emily is a swimmer, just like the rest of her family. Living the "blah" life, Emily is just blending in. Aria is different. Her likes and dislikes are borderline weird, at least to others. Aria just doesn't fit in. And Spencer has to deal with living in her sister's shadow. Sometimes, Spencer is just sick of the competition.

Things get really crazy when the girls have a sleepover at Spencer's and an argument gets out of hand. Alison disappears and they never hear from her again. Fast forward three years, and things have certainly changed. The remaining four girls don't even speak now. Aria's family moved away to Finland and just got back. Aria is used to hanging with older guys now and ends up wanting a relationship with her new teacher. Someone just bought Alison's old house with a teenager and bonds with Emily. The problem is, this new resident is helping Emily find out who she really is. Does Emily want to face the music? After many years, Hanna is no longer overweight and has a new set of friends and circumstances to deal with. Hanna finds out the hard way that wanting attention and being Barbie isn't all it's cracked up to be. Spencer is still living in her big sister's shadow but has her own agenda. It's not her fault that all her sister's boyfriends want her.

Soon, the creepiness begins. Someone is watching them all, with information on events that happened three years ago --- events that only each one of them knew...and Alison. But she's gone, right? Who else could twist their past and bring it into the future? Whoever it is, they know a little too much and are hell-bent on hurting them all, one way or another. As the girls are already spooked, things don't get any better when all their current secrets come tumbling out of the woodwork. Who's telling?

To make matters even stickier, the police finally find Alison's body...buried in her backyard. When they all come together again, it's at her memorial. No one is expecting the biggest secret to show up as well. It's no fun as the memorial ends and they all receive simultaneous text messages. From who? None other than Alison herself, letting them know she's still around, still watching and still exacting revenge.

Sara Shepard does an amazing job in this first installment of a four-book series. With mystery, intrigue and true-to-life characters, Shepard takes readers into a world of fake and fanciful spoiled brats. These are people who seemingly have it all, but when you delve a little deeper, they have just as many issues as the next kid. As PRETTY LITTLE LIARS expertly crafts just enough suspense to leave you waiting for the next book, one thing is for certain: high school will never be the same!

--- Reviewed by Belinda Williams

-- EXCERPT --

Chapter One

How it all started

Imagine it's a couple of years ago, the summer between seventh and eighth grade. You're tan from lying out next to your rock-lined pool, you've got on your new Juicy sweats (remember when everybody wore those?), and your mind's on your crush, the boy who goes to that other prep school whose name we won't mention and who folds jeans at Abercrombie in the mall. You're eating your Cocoa Krispies just how you like 'em --- doused in skim milk --- and you see this girl's face on the side of the milk carton. missing. She's cute --- probably cuter than you --- and has a feisty look in her eyes. You think, Hmm, maybe she likes soggy Cocoa Krispies too. And you bet she'd think Abercrombie boy was a hottie as well. You wonder how someone so . . . well, so much like you went missing. You thought only girls who entered beauty pageants ended up on the sides of milk cartons. Well, think again.

Aria Montgomery burrowed her face in her best friend Alison DiLaurentis's lawn. "Delicious," she murmured.

"Are you smelling the grass?" Emily Fields called from behind her, pushing the door of her mom's Volvo wagon closed with her long, freckly arm.

"It smells good." Aria brushed away her pink-striped hair and breathed in the warm early-evening air. "Like summer."

Emily waved 'bye to her mom and pulled up the blah jeans that were hanging on her skinny hips. Emily had been a competitive swimmer since Tadpole League, and even though she looked great in a Speedo, she never wore anything tight or remotely cute like the rest of the girls in her seventh-grade class. That was because Emily's parents insisted that one built character from the inside out. (Although Emily was pretty certain that being forced to hide her Irish Girls Do it Better baby tee at the back of her underwear drawer wasn't exactly character enhancing.)

"You guys!" Alison pirouetted through the front yard. Her hair was bunched up in a messy ponytail, and she was still wearing her rolled-up field hockey kilt from the team's end-of-the-year party that afternoon. Alison was the only seventh grader to make the JV team and got rides home with the older Rosewood Day School girls, who blasted Jay-Z from their Cherokees and sprayed Alison with perfume before dropping her off so that she wouldn't smell like the cigarettes they'd all been smoking.

"What am I missing?" called Spencer Hastings, sliding through a gap in Ali's hedges to join the others. Spencer lived next door. She flipped her long, sleek dark-blond ponytail over her shoulder and took a swig from her purple Nalgene bottle. Spencer hadn't made the JV cut with Ali in the fall, and had to play on the seventh-grade team. She'd been on a year-long field hockey binge to perfect her game, and the girls knew she'd been practicing dribbling in the backyard before they arrived. Spencer hated when anyone was better at anything than she was. Especially Alison.

"Wait for me!"

They turned to see Hanna Marin climbing out of her mom's Mercedes. She stumbled over her tote bag and waved her chubby arms wildly. Ever since Hanna's parents had gotten a divorce last year, she'd been steadily putting on weight and outgrowing her old clothes. Even though Ali rolled her eyes, the rest of the girls pretended not to notice. That's just what best friends do.

Alison, Aria, Spencer, Emily, and Hanna bonded last year when their parents volunteered them to work Saturday afternoons at Rosewood Day School's charity drive --- well, all except for Spencer, who volunteered herself. Whether or not Alison knew about the other four, the four knew about Alison. She was perfect. Beautiful, witty, smart. Popular. Boys wanted to kiss Alison, and girls --- even older ones --- wanted to be her. So the first time Ali laughed at one of Aria's jokes, asked Emily a question about swimming, told Hanna her shirt was adorable, or commented that Spencer's penmanship was way neater than her own, they couldn't help but be, well . . . dazzled. Before Ali, the girls had felt like pleated, high-waisted mom jeans --- awkward and noticeable for all the wrong reasons --- but then Ali made them feel like the most perfect-fitting Stella McCartneys that no one could afford.

Now, more than a year later, on the last day of seventh grade, they weren't just best friends, they were the girls of Rosewood Day. A lot had happened to make it that way. Every sleepover they had, every field trip, had been a new adventure. Even homeroom had been memorable when they were together. (Reading a steamy note from the varsity crew captain to his math tutor over the PA system was now a Rosewood Day legend.) But there were other things they all wanted to forget. And there was one secret they couldn't even bear to talk about. Ali said that secrets were what bonded their five-way best-friendship together for eternity. If that was true, they were going to be friends for life.

"I'm so glad this day is over." Alison moaned before gently pushing Spencer back through the gap in the hedges. "Your barn."

"I'm so glad seventh grade is over," Aria said as she, Emily, and Hanna followed Alison and Spencer toward the renovated barn-turned-guesthouse where Spencer's older sister, Melissa, had lived for her junior and senior years of high school. Fortunately, she'd just graduated and was headed to Prague this summer, so it was all theirs for the night.

Suddenly they heard a very squeaky voice. "Alison! Hey, Alison! Hey, Spencer!"

Alison turned to the street. "Not it," she whispered.

"Not it," Spencer, Emily, and Aria quickly followed.

Hanna frowned. "Shit."

It was this game Ali had stolen from her brother, Jason, who was a senior at Rosewood Day. Jason and his friends played it at inter-prep school field parties when scoping out girls. Being the last to call out "not it" meant you had to entertain . . .

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