This one was a wild ride from start to finish but do we expect anything less for a finale? I’ll tell you it was way more interesting than the TV show final season.

So the girls start off on trial for Alison’s murder, they fell right into Alison’s trap and are paying the consequences but it’s not looking good for them. Always in the wrong place at the wrong time and painting themselves in a bad light.

They decide before the trial starts to go to Nick in prison to see if they can get him to share any information on Alison and where she might go because we all know she’s still alive. Nick doesn’t want to crack at first but Emily pushes him and he mentions something about his grandmother’s old house in Cape May. Bingo. The girls go on the hunt.

Sadly for them, Alison escapes them once again as they show up at the beach house and it’s empty. No traces of Alison but the scent of that God damn vanilla soap that’s mentioned every five minutes. So the girls accept their fate, they’re going to prison because the only sure way they were going to get out was if they found Alison and proved she was alive.

So for their last night of freedom, the girls decide they might as well stay in Cape May and enjoy their time. I mean they’d already broken the terms of their bail by leaving the state so why not? Though the whole time the girls are having fun in the sun, something is niggling away at Emily and she can’t handle it any longer.

Spencer awakes in the night to find Emily missing and a suicide note in the hotel room. Uh oh. She races out to the beach where she can see Emily being swept away by the current. Spencer tries to rescue Emily but the storm is too strong and she is unable to. Which leads us to believe that Emily has drowned.

I don’t believe this for a second because it’s the last book and there is no way that one of the girls ends up dead now. They’ve been through far too much. I had a feeling maybe Alison got to her or something but I couldn’t be quite sure until the end.

So while the girls are grieving the loss of their friend, they also have to prepare to go trial for murder. It’s not a good time for any of them and Aria even decides to flee to Europe. Which is ballsy of her because I didn’t think she would scare off so easily.

Aria’s Europe adventure is short-lived, she travels to Paris and then from there heads out to Amsterdam where she runs into Noel of all people – apparently he had a feeling she would run away and she had mentioned going to Europe before so he thought he would follow her. Some would say romantic but I would say he’s crazy for helping a fugitive lol. But doesn’t matter because they both end up getting caught in the end and being sent back to Rosewood.

Meanwhile, Spencer and Hanna have been facing the trial alone, they had a big fight at Emily’s funeral so aren’t even speaking so it’s been pretty icy in the court room but things are not going in their favour. I mean, it seemed unlikely things would turn out okay for them when there’s so much evidence against them.

Outside of the courtroom, Hanna and Mike have been planning a wedding which is insane to me but Mike proposed to Hanna and said he would wait for her so they were looking to tie the knot before the verdict was decided. It might be the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard but I gotta give props to both their families for agreeing to let it happen and for them to see it through in the end. With all the crap Hanna has had to go through over the last few years she deserved to have her fairytale wedding.

As for Spencer, she also considered fleeing the country and she was going to pay off someone to help her get a fake ID to do it but she decides in the end that she couldn’t go through with it. She couldn’t imagine going off the grid and never seeing her friends again, plus she has reconnected with Wren of all people? And she wants to see where that goes. I still think Wren is a creeper but he was Spencer’s doctor after they rescued her from the storm after trying to save Emily and for some reason Wren was still hung up on Spencer and so yeah that’s a thing.

After the high of Hanna’s wedding the girls get pulled into the courtroom as the jury has decided on a verdict and surprise, surprise the girls are found: guilty.

I am not gonna lie, I was a little hopeful for them after their lawyer tried to get the truth out of Nick when he was called onto the stand but I guess that wasn’t enough to convince the jury the girls were innocent. I mean at this point, the media and everyone was calling for the girls to be found guilty it was going to be hard for them to prove their innocence.

So the girls go to prison, but at this point we are only halfway through the book so we have to know there’s more to the story right? Correct.

The girls are only in prison for five minutes because then they are called back to the courtroom as a surprise witness has just made an appearance: Emily. She’s not dead! Though we knew that.

Turns out she faked her death to track down Alison. She went back to the beach house and found an envelope with an address on it so she decided to see it through. And it turns out that she did track down Ali! Turns out her mother had been hiding her this whole time. Which I guess makes sense, Jessica hid CeCe for a while in the TV show and she seems like the kind of person who would do anything for her children. Even if they are psychotic.

So Ali gets sent to prison and the girls are free! Yay! And everyone lives happily ever after. Aria gets back with Noel and is able to sell her paintings and live her best life, Hanna stars in the movie about her life and gets into Parsons, Spencer decides to take a gap year and her book deal is back on and Emily is just trying to find herself and discover who she is without being tied down to her family.

And as always Alison is still planning revenge even from behind bars, she’s manipulated people from a psychiatric facility before and she can do it again. We love that for her.

And so there we have it! 16 books later and we are done! Well not quite, there are a couple of companion books which I’ll probably read too but will not do blog posts on them. I actually started Pretty Little Secrets directly after this one lol. Even though I should have read it forever ago considering the placement of it is right after Mona being A and Alison replacing her but it’s fine.

The point is we made it to the end of this series! And I am so proud of myself lol. 16 books is A LOT and I definitely could have given up at any point but I held on to this rollercoaster journey ’til the end. Will I take on another book series? Probably, there’s always one and it makes it easier to find what to read next if it’s a series but in the meantime I’m going to finish up this side book, and start reading all the other books I bought last year and still have not read lol.

Thanks for joining me on this PLL journey if you did, it’s been a long one. And with it, I think it ends the consistent blogging for a while, which is sad because I liked updating here a lot but I guess I’ll just need more things to write about lol. So yeah be back soon with something, or not. Guess we’ll see.