Ashley Mar Reads

I marked this as spoiler because you can't say anything about this book without it spoiling it!! This will be a somewhat full discussion, and there will be spoilers here and there!! 

If you don't want to be spoiled, leave now!

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Can I start out by saying that I was not part of the group of people who realized what the big reveal/twist was going to be right from the beginning, or even somewhere along in the story?  I had no clue what this major thing that happened to her was going to be.  I didn't guess it, ever.  I was completely in the dark until it was revealed.

And this was a major reveal.

I had it in my head that Gat had somehow violated Cady, or had gotten mad and hurt her.  I didn't pick up on any of the clues that E.Lockhart dropped.  But looking back through it I have picked up on a lot of them.  And I think she did a really nice job placing these clues here and there, that if you were to know what to look for you would have guessed.

There are a couple of theories about what actually happened.  Cady was hallucinating the entire time, which is possible considering she seems to have a type of post trauma and/or stress disorder.  Or the Liars were ghosts the entire time, helping Cady along.

I like to go with the later.  It just seems to make more sense to me, and I like that if they were ghosts, it's a more hopeful ending.  She really got to say goodbye to these people that she loves.  And she gets the closure that they actually forgive her for what happened.

I liked the writing style, as many people do.  But I found the metaphors slightly annoying at times, because I didn't know if she was being literal or not. And it confused me slightly.  Was that just me?

This book has left me with an almost empty feeling inside.  Whenever I think about it I feel almost incomplete and it makes me depressed.

I wish it hadn't ended the way it did, or I guess I wish the premise of the book hadn't happened.  But that isn't why I didn't give it a five star rating.  I see how the ending is necessary, I just wish it didn't have to happen that way.

The reason why I didn't give it five stars is because of the metaphors, and the fact that I wasn't emotionally attached to these characters.  Not until the end at least.  I just wanted to know them more, and be able to understand them more, because I spent a great deal of the book mad at at least one of them.  And it wasn't until the end that I got over these feelings and came to understand them.

Overall it was a great read.  I have loved everything I've read by E. Lockhart so far so I would recommend anything by her!  If this is the only book by her you've read, check out her Ruby Oliver series because it's awesome!