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.

In this one, everyone seemed to be sent on wild goose chases as they tried to figure out what happened to Alison and it was wild.

First, we have Emily, who tells the police after the fire at Spencer’s that they saw Alison and everyone thinks she’s insane because everyone knows Alison died. They found her body. Wilden even tells the girls that the body they found matched Alison’s DNA so it has to be her right?

Naturally, a side effect of this is everyone in the media thinking they are ridiculous, as the girl they saw disappeared around the time the authorities came, so they have no proof if it was Alison. This causes the media to brand the girls “Pretty Little Liars” how cute.

So yes Emily refuses to believe it is not Alison and A sends her on a mission to sneak into an Amish community to find out what the tea is there with Alison. And it’s so random, but what I really can’t believe is that Emily blindly went with it. Like yeah just blindly follow A out into Amish country for a while, that’s cool.

All that comes from this is that Emily finds out a girl who lives there disappeared around the same time that Alison disappeared and that the girl was dating Wilden. Which I guess sounds like a big deal because who knew that Wilden was Amish? Or like even was around the community to be dating someone…

It is also sus that the girl disappeared after saying she was going to leave her community to be with him but at the end of the book, Wilden tells Emily “it’s not what you think,” yeah like we believe that. I just hope that this plot point goes somewhere and isn’t dropped randomly just because.

Meanwhile, Aria didn’t have A to guide her as she went searching for answers on her own. After talking to her parents she thought maybe Alison’s ghost was trying to tell her something, so she goes to a seance. Where she sees Noel Kahn of all people?

The seance turns out to be a dud but Noel finds a different medium who Aria and he meet at the site Alison was buried in her garden and this is where Aria gets a note that says “Ali killed Ali”. Meaning Alison killed herself? Confusing but also kind of makes sense if you know what happens but the girls don’t yet so Aria is just trying to make peace with the fact that Alison might have killed herself. Which seems so off base like why would Alison put herself in the ground with the cement if she was going to commit suicide, even if she took sleeping pills or something that’s very suspicious…

Also of note, Aria and Noel bond after having lost someone close to them, for Aria it is Alison and for Noel, it was his older brother. Noel’s brother committed suicide when Noel was six, this is sad but it also seems like a weird thing for them to bond over. And they kiss so I guess they are kind of a thing now which is good because Noel is the same age as Aria so we approve of this.

No more mention of Ella’s creepy boyfriend hitting on Aria again so I wonder if this is just going to be dropped completely? I mean the girls have bigger things to worry about at the minute so maybe it’ll not come up again, which is fine by me I don’t need it.

Moving on to Spencer, something good happened to her! Sadly it only lasted for a short time, she confessed to her parents about the Olivia situation and they told her that Olivia was their surrogate and she did give birth to Spencer but she was not her daughter. And her parents aren’t even mad about the money being stolen and Spencer being scammed they realise they’ve been shitty parents and so decide to treat Spencer and the Hastings are a happy family once again.

Well, until A tells Spencer to go digging on her dad’s hard drive and she discovers the Peter Hastings and Jessica DiLaurentis affair. Like I said in a previous post, I’m glad this was a thing from the books that made it into the TV show. It’s so dramatic and shocking and I love it. Though in the books, Alison is the one who is the twin and was the result of the affair but in the TV show it’s Spencer. I also think on TV Jason was also Peter’s child because Peter Hastings really couldn’t keep it in his pants lol.

But yeah so Spencer finds this out and drops the bombshell on her mother because she thought she already knew and once again implodes their family with drama. This sucks for Spencer because she was finally living the life she had craved for so long and now her parents are going to be fighting about this. Poor Spence, I guess she has Andrew at least lol.

As for Hanna, well she’s living the most interesting life but she doesn’t know it yet. She ends up getting sent to a mental facility because her father thinks she needs to deal with her PTSD from Mona and now the fire. And I agree because honestly who doesn’t need therapy after their best friend runs them over with their car?

So Hanna is staying at this super fancy place Preserve at Addison Stevens and she has a super cool roommate there called Iris who gives her Alison vibes. She finds out that Iris had a roommate before who is called Courtney who was super cool but she got released recently – this is important because Courtney is Alison’s twin!! But the girls don’t know yet, sad. But also crazy that A would lead her so close to themselves like I didn’t think A wanted to be found out so soon.

Anyway yeah so Hanna makes friends with this girl but other people at the facility try to tell her that Iris is a psycho but she doesn’t listen until she finds out Iris sold a story to People magazine about Hanna’s mental institution stay. Not cute. Hanna is about to confront Iris about it and accuse her of killing Alison but she is hauled away by the police who arrest her.

Ah yes, I didn’t mention before but all the girls end up getting hauled off and arrested for murdering Alison and Ian. So wild and also dramatic for A to set up, especially because minutes later they all get released as the police have found Ali’s “real” murderer.

Apparently, the real murderer is some guy who was working on the construction of the DiLaurentis gazebo, the one where Alison’s body was found. There was evidence of him stalking the girls and sending the A messages, which wraps things all up in a nice neat bow…except we all know that is not what happened and that this man was set up by the real A because why would a grown ass man care enough to send these girls anonymous messages and find out all their secrets? Surely he would just stay hidden and creepy and stalkerish without that right?

And that’s not all that happens at the end of the book, we find out that Jenna was murdered?! Um, what?! So this came out of nowhere for me, I mean we know Jenna knows more than she had let on when she spoke to Aria that one time but we didn’t even get a chance to know what she knows. Aside from the photo A sent Emily with Jenna, Alison and another blonde. She also was spotted outside Aria’s house that one time looking like she wanted to tell her something but we never found out what…

So now we have to see if the girls are able to find out why A would kill Jenna. Which I am sure A will make as difficult as possible because why else would they kill Jenna if not to keep what she knew a secret?

Naturally, I have to start the next book right away because I need to know what’s happening. Also amazed that Alison’s twin has the power and strength to be out killing people, I mean killing your sister is one thing out of rage, adrenaline kicks in and they’re your size so you can take them. But then killing Ian? And moving his body to and from the woods, A definitely has help. And then I guess Jenna is not too far-fetched as she has a disadvantage being blind…poor girl.

And that’s where we are, for now, I’ll probably be back in a few days with another post because I need to find out what happens…I also can’t believe there are still 9 books in this series like that’s crazy but I’m too far gone now to stop and I don’t plan to so I’ll be back soon!