My first encounter with Emily, Spencer, Aria, Hanna, the mysterious A and a whole host of other characters came when I started watching the series on Netflix. It’s the kind of series where everyone is impossibly glamorous – I’m pretty certain that few people look like this lot at high school – but the wicked humour and clever plotting has quickly made it a firm favourite of mine. Although I’ve become an avid fan of the series, I wasn’t sure if I could face reading the sixteen novels on which the show is based.
I can only apologise, and say that I wish I hadn’t waited so long.
For those of you unfamiliar with the series we focus on what was a close-knit group of friends. They have gone their separate ways since the ‘leader’ of their group – Alison – has gone missing. Her disappearance causes ripples in the small community of Rosewood but life goes on.
Just like the TV series we are aware very early on that the key characters are all involved in something that the group want to remain hidden. Their secret has kept them tied to each other, even though they don’t seem to like each other very much at times. We become aware that each of the girls also has their own secret, which Alison knew, but none of the others were aware of. These secrets are things they don’t want anyone to know about, yet when they start receiving messages from ‘A’ we watch them unravel as they try to work out just who is watching them.
The idea of someone monitoring their every move in the way that would have to be happening here is quite creepy. Initially the girls think Alison can’t have disappeared and that she is tormenting them for her own fun. However, when her body is found in her old back-yard, it seems there’s a little more to this mystery than we first thought.
While I found the constant name-checking of brands and products rather irritating in the novel, I was interested to see how the novels differed from the show. The female characters in the book are more nuanced than we’re led to believe and I liked the fact that their roles within the group are not quite so defined. In my head as I’m reading I confess to visualising the characters from the show, even though in a number of cases they are nothing alike. The first novel ends shortly after the discovery of Alison’s body so we are left with many questions, and I really liked the device of having A directly address us at the end.
I picked this up because of a reading challenge I’m involved in which is focusing on Series reads – with sixteen to get through, I might not manage them all in one go but I’m happy to read along for a little.