Wanted PLL Book #8 by Sara Shepard Review

This one was a wild ride from start to finish and I was OBSESSED.

First of all, the DiLaurentises decide to hold a press conference to announce they’ve had a secret daughter for the last 16 years. I mean wtf lol. Personally, I feel like I wouldn’t hold a press conference for this but at the same time, their daughter was murdered and if her identical twin just started appearing around town it would be questionable. So yes, welcome to the stage Courtney DiLaurentis.

Naturally, the first thing Courtney does is talk to the four best friends of her sister Alison. The girls are shocked and weirded out by how much this girl looks like the Alison they knew and loved but she wasn’t. Or is she??

One by one, Courtney reveals to the girls she’s actually Alison and that Courtney was mentally ill and pretended to be her. So Alison ended up getting sent away to a mental institution. So the girl that was killed was actually Courtney.

Kind of confusing but that’s where we are. Alison also says she wants to be friends with all the girls again just like old times and the girls don’t really take much convincing.

I mean Emily was the easiest because she was so helplessly in love with Alison, all that Alison had to do was kiss Emily and she agreed. Which is sad because I wanted more for Emily but no she’s just annoying when she’s blinded by her love for Ali even though she did horrible things to them and lead her on.

After Emily, came Hanna. Alison easily swept in and complimented Hanna, promising her that she’d get revenge on Kate, Riley and Naomi for being mean to Hanna. Now Hanna and Alison could be the besties Hanna has always wanted now that Hanna was getting the validation she needed from Ali.

Next, Alison exploits Spencer’s fragile feelings about them being sisters and says they could really be the sisters they’ve always wanted. Especially when Spencer’s family has exploded and Alison is the only relative of hers that is interested in talking to her. Poor Spence, again thought she’d be stronger.

Last but not least, Aria was the hardest to convince and I am glad because someone needed to be suspicious of Alison coming back into their lives like nothing happened. Sadly for Aria, she was not immune to Ali’s manipulation tactics because as soon as Ali accuses Noel of kissing her and not the other way around, Aria is ready to dump Noel and hang out with her old best friends again…

So all the girls are headed out to Alison’s family’s house in the Poconos to recreate the night of the sleepover where Alison disappeared. And all the while things have seemed hella suspicious for example, Alison not remembering things that happened with the girls when they were friends. But Alison convinces them that recreating the night she disappeared will be helpful for her to rewrite the memory and so they agree to be hypnotised.

Next thing you know, the girls open their eyes and Ali is nowhere to be seen, they find a letter which details the truth about Alison and Courtney DiLaurentis. Turns out that Courtney switched places with Alison the day of the Time Capsule flag, Alison was sent away to the Preserve and Courtney became friends with Aria, Emily, Hanna and Spencer and that was the Ali they knew and loved. Alison managed to escape the Preserve and get her revenge on Courtney and now she was going to kill the girls too for enabling Courtney to steal her life.

Alison had set fire to the house the girls were in and while they are trying to escape they discover Ian’s dead body in the closet, along with Melissa. Now Melissa had been acting shady this whole book and it turns out she was investigating Alison because she was suspicious of her the whole time. Apparently, Melissa knew Alison had a twin all along and she knew they didn’t get along as soon as Alison came back as Courtney and said her sister talked about the girls all the time she knew something was up. So the girls always saw Melissa being shady, talking to Wilden, skulking about in the woods etc.

Somehow Alison managed to drug and kidnap Melissa and stuck her in the trunk of her car before she drove the girls to the Poconos. Wild. I like to believe that Melissa is taller than Ali and so it’s hard to imagine her coming in and drugging and stuffing a grown-ass woman like Melissa into her trunk but there you go haha. I suppose Ali is highly unstable and capable of anything if she was killing Ian and Jenna so makes sense she could kidnap Melissa.

Anyway that all happens, the girls manage to escape and they think Alison died in the fire, as Emily was confronting her before there was an explosion inside the house. And then the girls’ lives go back to normal and they all live happily ever after.

BUT WAIT – there are EIGHT more books hahaha. So yeah in the acknowledgements at the end of this book Sara Shepard clearly says this is the end but clearly not. I guess Sara wasn’t as done with the series as she thought. And so we must continue this journey.

I gotta say though if the TV show had just stuck with the original story of Alison having a twin I would have preferred it. I know they wanted to add a spin with Spencer having the twin instead and I guess that would have been fine but only if they hadn’t thrown in CeCe in the middle. Like I did recently rewatch all of PLL and I’ll say the reveals weren’t as terrible as I originally thought they were but they still weren’t great. I would have rather had an Uber A who was pulling the strings the whole time rather than the game being passed around.

Plus the last season of PLL was TERRIBLE in general, they focused way too much on the girls’ relationships and the tasks A made them do were pitiful. So I’m glad the books wrap things up in a nice way. I fully believe I could just stop reading the books here and it’ll be fine but I bought all 16 for my Kindle so gotta stick it out.

All I hope is that the quality doesn’t dip because sometimes you can have too much of something and it goes downhill and I think the TV show is a prime example of that. So we’ll see, I guess it will be interesting to see if the TV show takes anything from the later books…

But yeah that’s where we are with PLL, and I think I will take this opportunity to read some other things before diving back into PLL. I have been really enjoying these books, don’t get me wrong but if there’s ever a time to take a proper break from a book series it’s when there’s a clear break in them. Like I said, this book wraps the series up pretty well, Alison is seemingly dead and the girls have begun to rebuild and move on with their lives so I can safely leave them there until I am ready to pick it up again and see what drama is next.

Plus it gives me time to blog about something else for a change lol not that I hate this but it would be nice to have some other content on the blog. Not sure what that content will be but we’ll see, I’d say give it a month or so before we get back to PLL though because I do want to complete the series and not forget about it.

Also with this book, I have completed my reading challenge for 2022! So exciting! I definitely have not finished reading for the year but I’m proud of myself for hitting my goal – I guess next year we will have to set it a bit higher. It’s all about being realistic with the goal though, don’t want to aim too high. But anyway that’s not something we have to think about ’til next year lol.