Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead. Hanna, Spencer, Aria, and Emily are learning this lesson after the disappearance of their augustly best friend, Alison. The four girls receive threatening texts and emails from an anonymous source while trying to handle a life full of school, extracurricular activities, and friendship. These messages bring up old secrets of the girls’ that only Ali knows, which leads them to think that she is still alive and sending these. As the book comes to a conclusion, the girls come to an atrocious conclusion in the case of their missing friend, when they find Alison’s body buried in the ground beneath their family’s gazebo. While reading this Young Adult novel, I am able to connect with the characters, visualize …show more content…
In middle school, Hanna used to be described as this: “a chubby, clingy loser” (Shepard 46). Between eighth and ninth grade, Hanna changed completely and became the new “It Girl” of Rosewood Day by losing a bunch of weight. Hanna and I have gone through sort of the same transformation, in regards to physical appearance and social status in high school. During the summer after eighth grade, I committed to working out and losing weight, to get to a healthy weight, much like Hanna did. Throughout eighth and ninth grade, I rose up from the obscurity that I was during fifth and sixth grade, and got new “popular” friends. People often say that I am like Hanna, due to that transformation and the fact that we both enjoy shopping and luxury items. Spencer is another character that I can connect to easily for many reasons. The main reason is that we are both competing with someone for one reason or another. In the novel, Spencer is competing with her sister, Melissa; I compete with my friends. It’s evident that Spencer is affected by this competition, when Sara Shepard writes: “she never quite reached Melissa’s level of perfection” (Shepard 51). Spencer and I both compete with others in regards to our grades and indelible achievements. Being able to …show more content…
Now, I normally don’t like this form of writing, but Shepard does it so well and effectively that I thoroughly enjoy it. She goes so in-depth with writing her characters that you never need to go back to check who you are reading about. Giving each character their own background, and going into so much detail about them, adds so much to the book and the plotline, and is such a good way to engage the readers. Like I have previously stated, this makes it so the reader is able to connect with the characters on a level that isn’t superficial, and will get to know more about themselves and the characters. I feel that if Shepard didn’t add this dimension to her novels, that it never would have gotten as popular as it has, and never would have become such a renowned television series (even though it doesn’t directly follow the