Pretty Little Liars by Sara Shepard - paperbackreader.net:
On first glance Pretty Little Liars looks like one of a million Gossip Girl followers with its shiny, attractive girls on the cover and its high society setting. When I picked it up during a lunch break at work, I was expecting something light and commercialistic, what I found instead was a TwinPeaks-esque story line where instead of trying to figure out who killed Laura Palmer I was wondering if Alison DiLaurentis was even dead.
Pretty Little Liars defies the definition of a guilty pleasure (a label often applied to Gossip Girls and others) through a combination of smart writing and an interesting plot, but it is not without its flaws.
Emily’s forays into lesbianism with Maya, while they may fall under the label “forbidden,” rank low on the list of crimes—moral or legal—the other girls have committed (Hanna’s thievery, Aria’s relationship with her teacher, and Spencer’s relationship with her sister’s boyfriend). Hanna's acting out seems to be by far the most extreme: stealing expensive jewelry, then stealing & crashing a car while drunk. that seems legally a big deal.
Emily's fumbling and heart-felt conclusion that she doesn’t want to live a lie anymore seems to counter any reason A has for her persecution. Emily, of all the girls, seemed to truly love Alison the most (and feel the most regret for the Jenna incident) and comes to some serious realizations about herself as the others self-destruct. The introduction of her parents’ racist thoughts as a further barrier to her growth seemed almost a tag on, as if to reaffirm the overarching theme of parental pressure and disapproval that all the girls are operating under, destroying the story’s one possibility at a semi-healthy family.
In fact, I take issue with the portrayal of all the parents within the novel. especially Spencer's geez: 'I'm mortified you are my daughter.' and then, when the body of her missing friend is found, they don't even check on her. Not one girl seems to have a supportive or cohesive parental unit that is there for them: Hanna’s mother seems to be in a subversive competition with her daughter, urging her on even as she tears her down; Spencer’s parents are so focused on perfectionism that they can’t see her self-destruction or recognize any aberrant behavior for what it is—a way to escape her sister’s shadow; and Aria is forced by her parents into an adult role through her knowledge of her father’s affair and her practically limitless freedom in Europe, only to have that yanked away when they arrive back in the United States.
With parents like these, it is no wonder that each girl acts out in destructive ways and has no one to lean on. I know that this is meant to cause the girls to rely on one another, and these parental relationships are realistic in their portrayal, but the overall smear against parental authority is overkill.
Still, there are the only sour notes in this otherwise engrossing society girl who-done-it, appropriate for older teens and adults alike.

comments:
-Ralene: Hi I would love to know who is who? Who's the one wearing the glittery greenish tank and the jeans on Flawless and the other three girls? yes I've wondered too, Aria clearly the alterna~ish dark-haired girl, & Spencer probably the well turned out skirted blond. but then problem seems to be that I expect Hanna to be blond, & Emily dark haired...
-Ralene, Spencer is on the first book right, Hanna the second ok she's the one w glittery tank, makes sense, she's the one trying to be thin & fabulous. so, dark haired, Aria the third right, and Emily the fourth ok, light haired - sneakers & pants make sense since she's the swimmer,~ least into glam..

note that it is through Veronica Mars I think that I became int to sample mysteries (Columbo tv series, then Grafton & Kellerman & other bestselling mass markets) and somewhat also recent teen fiction. the latter I was already by char more int in ~ high school, hot house of personalies on show, in interaction. and the teen series & novels I have at home in my upstairs white desk shelves all have deep resonance with me, memory, that I knew these characters and stories when I was -
but VM creator Rob Thomas's int in writing teen fiction, and my thinking of it as a variation on tv, plus now Kristen Bell doing the voice of Gossip Girl - these things did open up the current trendy teen entertainment world to my interest.

bought at Borders (seemed fitting and I felt like rdg it and was on 53rd and went it to look see if they had the series and this #1 was in paperback -yellow- on display table and saw it soon after entering, so). quick read last nite, this morning. worth it, but prob not to read #2 Flawless (orange) & #3 Perfect (pink -one I first saw, came thru mailroom while back, from 57th St special order to UK, by GPM) which are out now in hardcover only. but I will want to read the end in #4, due out March 2008: Amazon.com: Pretty Little Liars #4: Unbelievable (Pretty Little Liars): Books: Sara Shepard

____________________________________________11/17/08 read Unbelievable. got the hardcover fr az months ago, note that I again seemed appropr to buy it fr a mass retailer (before, Borders). ~cheap from cheap. but this time, struck much much more by how bad it was. plot okay but the descriptions! 'commercialistic' (rvw above) was it this bad in first book?! (Iseem to remember it as if it seemed fairly well-done for mass-produced teen lit, & rvw above seems concur.) this latest one seems weird to bizarre all the descriptions of clothes: Her father stood there wearing a soft grey longsleeve tshirt, and his jeans with holes... + lots lots brand names ~ seven jeans, mac makeup ~ I get that this is supposed to be a DespHousewives for teens ~ seamy-underside-of-posh-lifestyle, so we need the makers of posh, but all the descriptions of what everyone is wearing seemed over the top, like a parody, but no evidence of tongue in cheek. weird. seemed like product placement. kept moving me to wonder if Alloy 'book-packaging' gets money from companies for mentioning their products. ..ah here go:
Brands New World | Culture11: .. the abundance of brand-name dropping in literature directed at tweens — that impressionable 10 through 14 years of age demographic — is widespread.. esp Book series like Clique, Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The A List, which have individually sold millions of copies since the beginning of the naughts.
The Hit Factory-aprilhenry.livejournal: I’m always fascinated by stories of Alloy Entertainment, which has given us Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and The Clique – as well as How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life.
An LA Times story about Alloy’s involvement with TV and movies says, “The company, New York-based Alloy Entertainment, is a book factory similar to the syndicates that created the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series decades ago. Editors cook up ideas they think will appeal to teens and then hire writers to follow their outlines, similar to the way dramas and sitcoms are written for TV. Alloy produces about 30 books a year; six of them last week were on the New York Times bestseller list. yeah I guess it's not new. plenty of low-substance franchise tween books in my day too, most notably Sweet Valley High ~ the Francine Pascal franchise. and I recall sitting in a train car w J & S Blanck, thinking up backcover plot blurbs for Sweet Valley High books-to-be. reading those prepares fans to think like book packagers, to talk like author Sara Shepard does in her az blog: Today is the "official" day Unbelievable is available...which means you'll finally get to find out the many mysteries of Rosewood. Who is A? What really happened the night Ali went missing? Is everything really as it seems...or do the secrets go deeper? to talk like a marketer. which is a terrible terrible way to talk. but d n seem terrible to me then. in what is it so terrible, as I see it now? salesmanship, ramped up emotion, prefabricated phrases. only terrible to me now bcs I have so severe a need for origins, for ppl to say things that are from them, for ppl to be there. for there to be a there there.