Kat with a K

Review: Pretty Little Liars

Pretty Little Liars by Sara Shepard
Genre: YA
Pages: 286
Rating: 6.9

The ABC Family show based on this series of novels starts tonight (and I'll have a post about the pilot up tomorrow or Thursday), so I figured I should give the books a try. And it was . . . okay. Really, I'm hoping this show will continue the Gossip Girl/Vampire Diaries trend of taking mediocre teen books and turning them into really good TV. Anyway. The most popular girl in seventh grade disappears, and with her a bunch of secrets. Three years later, her former best friends start getting mysterious messages referring to things that only the vanished girl knew, and their lives start falling apart. Each girl has a Big Secret: one thinks she might be gay, one has an eating disorder, one saw her father having sex with one of his students, etc. There's a very Grey's Anatomy scene in which a girl discovers the hot guy she'd picked up the night before the first day of school is actually her new teacher. You get the idea.

None of the characters are particularly nice, but they're all at least somewhat sympathetic - except, perhaps, for the girl who disappeared. The way her friends remember her, at least, she was basically the meanest of Mean Girls, and I'll be interested to see whether this image changes at all as the series progresses. There's a lot of label name-dropping - Kate Spade, Tiffany's, etc., and that got a little tiresome, but I know a certain sort of Gossip Girl-esque book needs to have that. It's set in the Philadelphia Main Line, and some of the brands mentioned do place it there nicely - everyone's always going to Wawa, and one character not only buys Tastykakes, but Butterscotch Krimpets, specifically. I think there was a cheesesteak mention, too, although, of course, none of these girls would actually eat something like a cheesesteak.

This book was by no means great, and maybe not even good, but it was entertaining enough, and I am actually curious enough about the big mystery of the vanished girl to keep reading the series, at least for a while. (It helps that it's a quick read - I read it in a little under two hours.) It looks like they're up to eight books or so, and I can't imagine how they'll sustain this for so long, but . . . well, we'll see. As mindless summer fun, it's not bad. And I look forward to seeing how it translates to TV.