Review: Wanted by Sara Shepard

Wanted

Author: Sara Shepard
Series: Pretty Little Liars, #8

Summary: BEING WANTED ISN'T ALWAYS A GOOD THING.

For three long years, Hanna, Spencer, Aria, and Emily wondered what happened the night their best friend Alison disappeared. Now that all their questions have finally been answered, they can put this awful chapter of their lives behind them. Or so they think.

Not every story has a happy ending, especially when four pretty little liars have done so many wicked things. Will the girls get everything they've ever wanted? Not if I have anything to say about it. -A

Review

 NOTE: This review contains spoilers from the Pretty Little Liars series by Sara Shepard, as well as a few spoilers from Wanted. If you have never read this series, I suggest you to skip this review and read my review of the first book, Pretty Little Liars, instead. If you have read the series, or you don't mind spoilers, you may proceed. :)

 They say a picture's worth a thousand words. Take, for instance, a shot of a family grinning on the front porch of a Victorian mansion. Now look closer. Dad's smile seems kind of forced. Mom's gazing off at a neighbor's house. Brother grips the porch rail tight. And sister smiles mysteriously, as if she's hiding a delicious secret. The backyard is torn up by a bulldozer, and someone's lurking in the background, a blur of blond hair and pale skin. Is that a guy . . . or a girl? It could be a trick of the light or a finger smudge. Or perhaps all those things you missed upon first glance mean much more than you could ever guess.

Four pretty girls in Rosewood believe they have a clear picture of what happened the night their best friend went missing. But if they comb through their memories once more, focusing on the flickers in the periphery, the uneasy feelings they can't pin down, that picture might change right before their eyes and they might be astounded--even terrified--by what they discover.
Truth is stranger than fiction, after all. Especially here in Rosewood. -excerpt from Wanted by Sara Shepard

 Three years ago, Alison DiLaurentis, Rosewood, Pennsylvania's most loved and beautiful girl, went missing, leaving four best friends behind. Now Spencer Hastings, Aria Montgomery, Hanna Marin, and Emily Fields think they've finally found her murderer: Billy Ford. The girls try to continue on with their lives as normally as possible, but something is eating away at the back of their minds, threatening to unravel them. Some things about Billy's arrest just didn't fit. How did Billy get all those photos of the girls? How did he learn all of their innermost secrets and how did he know their phone numbers and emails to threaten them as A? And why did this stranger kill Ali, Jenna, and most likely Ian, for no reason at all? None of it made any sense.

And then something even more baffling occurs. The DiLaurentis's hold a press conference, making an announcement about a secret that blows everything out of the water. At this point my mind was like "wait... WHAT?!" and then "There's NO WAY this is happening!!" But it was happening, and no. It doesn't stop there. From that point on, the story continues to make your heart race with the turning of each page. You don't know what's going on, or why it's happening, and then your heart just drops. And finally, FINALLY, you learn the truth about what really happened all those years ago. Who killed Ali. Why they killed her. And believe me, the reveal is as shocking as this entire story has been. It's crazier than you ever could have imagined. Sara has built up so much tension between the characters and anticipation into the reveal of the truth, and part of you wonders if it's going to be as big as she makes you think it will be. And then as you're finally reading the truth to what happened that night, you can't believe what you're reading, so you go back and reread it, and you realize that you really did read what you thought was your mind playing tricks on you. I do believe that my mouth was hanging open as I read it. The answers to so many questions are right in front of you, and you still can't believe it.

The ending to Wanted was written in a way that makes you think that it is the end of the series. You read about what happened after the big reveal and what the girls are doing to cope with the truth and what they all have in store for them for the future, but then I remember that there are more books in the series and I'm thinking, did Sara intend on finishing the series with Wanted and then decide to continue on, or did she just make the readers think that it was the ending with the intention of writing more about the Pretty Little Liars after the reveal of the truth? And just what could Sara possibly have in store for these four girls who have already been through so much? Surely, nothing bad... Right?

Wanted is definitely worth the read. If you've read the series up until this point, but you haven't yet picked up this book, you need to. In my opinion, it's the best of the PLL books so far, and I'm really excited to see what happens to these girls next. It's been one wild ride, and I'm anxious to read more.

I rate this book: