Pretty Little Liars #11: Stunning

One of Shepard’s methods of stringing out what little plot she has is to feed us one or two morsels of this volume’s story in the prologue, spread the rest out very thinly throughout the rest of the text whilst bulking the chapters out with inconsequential flimflam regarding outfits and stylish parties, and then finally throw the remainder of the details in our faces at the book’s conclusion before rushing out of the door with her latest cheque. Accordingly, in this prologue we learn that Emily was going to sell her baby to a rich woman called Gayle, (there is no mention of the morality of this) rather than just hand her over to the Social Services like normal people, but at the last minute decided that Gayle was a psycho for reasons we are not yet privy to. Therefore she involves her 3 sort-of-friends in a plot to steal the baby from the hospital and leave it on the doorstep of a nice family called the Bakers, thereby creating a convenient new enemy/suspect in Gayle. We know they are nice because they have a simple name and golden retrievers. We still don’t know what is wrong with normal adoption channels. There has also been no mention whatsoever of contraception, which could’ve saved everyone a lot of trouble.

Back to the present. Everything is as usual. Everyone is still very rich and there are still a lot of mentions of the TV-movie “Pretty Little Killer” for no reason that is apparent. Aria is still with Noel, which means a lot of bra-touching and whining. Klaudia is now with Ezra and they are apparently looking for flats to rent together, which seems a bit previous. Spencer’s mother is planning an extravagantly revolting luxury wedding, and Spencer’s stepfather-to-be hands her an audition with a play producer on a plate, because everything comes easily to rich bitches. On the same note we hear a lot about summat called “Eating Clubs” which Spencer may or may not join at Princeton, membership of which involves a process called “bicker”, hinges on you being a massive snob, and grants you the right to whichever of the top jobs takes your fancy. It’s basically like watching the conversation between Lord Snot and Miss Money-Sterling in the Young Ones episode “Bambi” except without the satire or humour. Meanwhile Hanna is now best friends with Kate, increasing the likelihood that she is ‘A’#3 quite considerably, and her father is still running for senate. It increasingly appears that there is going to be a full political-campaign storyline running through at least 4 books without any mention of a political party, which is pretty pathetic. Also, Hanna has now taken to saving some time by simply imagining what type of notes ‘A’#3 would send if they could be bothered. In a similar move, Emily re-reads hers in order that they can be re-used in the text, relieving Shepard from having to create any identical new blackmailish compositions. Other than that she doesn’t do much except find out by accident that the Bakers have moved away, which she finds very upsetting even though she couldn’t have cared less about the baby for the last 2 books. What makes her so confident that the authorities have allowed them to keep a baby they found dumped on their doorstep is not explained.

A lot of filler happens, undisguised by the repetitive writing. Everyone feels emotions ripple through their gut or burn in their stomach, or possibly feel like ping-pong balls in their stomach before said organ drops to their feet. There are a lot of descriptions of hair-colour, shoes and skirts. Aria talks on and on about how perfect Noel’s family are, thereby immediately cursing them with family problems; sadly the best Shepard can come up with is that Mr.Kahn is a cross-dresser who wanders around nearby supermarkets in his wife’s frocks. Spencer meets a Grateful-Dead-loving stoner cliché called Reefer, in a scene where political feeling is portrayed as a sort of embarrassing social disease which must be avoided at all costs. Hanna tries to seduce Mike in public because she is jealous that he has a new girlfriend, fails and deservedly makes a fool out of herself. We learn that the local gym now offers pole dancing lessons which are fully viewable to the testosterone-fuelled clientele, all of whom watch with impunity whilst teen girls gyrate in public. Meanwhile Emily bumps into Isaac and suddenly realises that she should’ve been through that whole “should I tell my baby’s father that I’m pregnant?” question a year or so earlier. She’s distracted from this pretty quickly when she realises that in one of those PLL coincidences that drive most of the plotting Mr.Marin’s new campaign donor is Gayle the Psycho of the prologue. Immediately afterward the girls have one of their usual conflabs and decide that Gayle must be ‘A’#3, which conclusively proves that she isn’t. Emily does, to her credit, attempt to point out that their deductions make no sense, but is roundly ignored since they have the highly-incriminatory evidence that Spencer saw Gayle in a cake shop last week. After all, why would Gayle be in a cake shop unless she was the crazy blackmailer that knows all their secrets and has been stalking them obsessively for months?

More nothing happens. Aria continues to dwell on the drag issue, extrapolating that since Mr.Khan was wearing a frock he doesn’t love his wife any more, or panicking that ‘A’#3 might find out even though there is exactly no blackmail potential in the matter whatsoever as far as Aria is concerned. We hear a little about Emily’s difficult decision regarding whether her baby’s primary need is love or money. Since this is obvious and we already know the outcome it doesn’t make for very exciting reading. We also learn that Gayle has recently lost a child, which is important for cod-psychology reasons of a “Hand That Rocks the Cradle” standard. Hanna attends a pole-dancing class to impress Mike, and it’s supposed credentials as genuine exercise rather than titillation are somewhat tested by the fact that she is allowed to join the class straight off the street, wearing stripper make-up and super-high silver high-heels. The whole sequence is both appalling and ridiculous, with both Hanna and Colleen delighted to be leered over by all the nearby teen boys as they dance to “Hot Stuff” (The Full Monty being Shepard’s only reference stripper-wise) and the whole thing culminating in Hanna’s pièce de résistance, a slight flash of the very edge of her red bra, which drives all the boys there insane with lust due to the intense bra-fetishism which pervades Rosewood. To create a contrast with this scene Emily goes to church and confesses her child-bearing supposed-sins. It doesn’t help. We hear a little more about Gayle’s child who had an accident when she was young before dying recently, but Emily forms no suspicions about who the mysterious dead child might be. Also, there’s some business about one of the Alisons calling Meredith 5 years ago to ask her about a lot of stuff which is now over-and-done-with and was dull even when it was happening 10 books ago. Why is it being brought up now? I have no idea.

A lot of stuff too dull to write about occurs. ‘A’#3 gets a girl Spencer vaguely knows arrested for drug-possession in a highly unlikely manner, the police responding within minutes to a tip-off that a student girl may have some marijuana. People continue to say “über” a lot. Hanna is astounded when Mike gest annoyed at her calling his girlfriend a slut to her face. Aria is threatened by ‘A’#3 with the public display of a photo of Mr.Kahn in drag, to be released if she doesn’t break up with Noel. This seems very much not her problem to me, but she takes it fairly seriously. Emily remains convinced that Alison has/had supernatural power and is/was essentially omniscient , which is how she achieves/achieved the blackmail business. To be fair, it is hard to see how ‘A’#3s is managing without telepathy and teleportation powers at the bare minimum, so maybe she’s onto summat. Hanna buys some camouflage gear, a “field-scope”, night-vision goggles and a military helmet in order to spy on Colleen, because she is absolutely demented. However it doesn’t occur to her, even though she’s on a covert operation, to turn her phone on to silent.

After some prevarication the girls decide to steal Gayle’s phone in order to prove that she’s ‘A’#3, even though there have been numerous times in the series when someone has pointed out that one of the various ‘A’s probably or definitely has a second phone for blackmail purposes and that therefore their original phone is no evidence whatsoever of anything. However all of this has slipped the girls’ minds, for some reason. In the meantime Spencer buys some pot from Reefer to impress some cool kids, decides she fancies him but then pretends not too, as she does with all rich young males who come within a 50-foot radius of her. Emily meets her completely characterless friend Derrick, who exists merely to be the other half of her conversations during the period when she was in hiding due to the baby business, and then later hang about knowing her secrets and therefore being suspicious. Aria actually dumps Noel even there is no need to, because she is ridiculous. A party descends into a bacchanalian orgy due to the effects of a single tray of space cakes. Hanna finds out that Colleen was in an advert for laxatives, and decides to use this fact to bully her mercilessly in revenge for the absolutely nothing that Colleen has done to her.

Eventually we reach the 2/3 party, in this case the Marin fundraiser at which the girls plan to pointlessly steal Gayle’s phone. Spencer however fails to make it as she is suddenly in hospital, having apparently overdosed on a mix of weed, Ritalin and LSD, a bizarre combination that ‘A’#3 apparently managed to sneak to the whole party via means that are not explained. She also sees Teresa, or a vision or Teresa, or some nonsense. Meanwhile Hanna is delayed deciding not to bully Colleen after all, and is immediately rewarded by being made a figure of fun by ‘A’#3, which to be fair she deserves. Then ‘A’#3 claims to have kidnapped Emily’s baby, causing Emily, Hanna and Aria to panic and run about like idiots for a while before falling into ‘A’#3’s trap and going to Gayle’s house. There they eventually discover that Gayle’s mystery dead daughter is Tabitha, the mystery dead girl they’re all obsessed with. Whilst this is incredibly obvious it does raise the question of how the girls can have been following all the Tabitha-based news stories for months without picking up a single clue about her much-mentioned her bereaved mother.

But there’s no time for answers or sense. Instead Gayle is suddenly found dead, her usefulness as a red herring at an end, and the girls are apparently to be framed for her murder despite the complete lack of motive or logic. Spencer is included in this as she abruptly turns up at the crime-scene, having presumably recovered from the never-again-mentioned overdose. Everyone trots off to the police station, where we find out that Gayle was actually Tabitha’s step-mother. This apparently explains why she wasn’t in any of the news reports, although I don’t know how it does so. Eventually the girls realise with shock that they were once more totally wrong about the identity of A, and go home. Luckily Spencer’s father turns out to be old friends with the father of investigating officer Lowry, and so there are no legal ramifications for the girls to face and they walk away consequence-free as usual. The events of the book are then negated as Aria and Noel get back together, since their breaking –up made no sense, Hanna and Mike get back together, since he finds being stalked flattering, and Spencer sorts her Princeton problem out by a combination of blackmail and realising that she isn’t actually arsed anyway, and has been wasting everyone’s time for this entire book. Also she fancies Reefer apparently, which means she’ll be going out with him 10 minutes from now. Finally Emily is probably back with Isaac and it turns out that her baby was safe all along, in exactly the place she was supposed to be. Conclusion, everyone lives happily ever after because they all have money and boyfriends, and none of the stuff that happened in the book was important anyway. Except for all the dead people, and who cares about them?

As the book ends the girls attend Gayle’s funeral, which seems in bad taste, at which it is announced that Tabitha’s autopsy is back and she in fact died not from alcohol but from murder!! This isn’t actually how autopsies work, but never mind. Then ‘A’#3 reminds them that all the crap from the beginning of the book is still happening, before rushing unseen from the church whilst giggling psychotically. The end.

Stupidest Names
Patrice
Kerri Randolph
Colleen Bebris
Harper Essex-Pembroke
Tansy Gates
Raif Fredricks (a.k.a Reefer)
Madame Richeau
Trixie the Pole Dance Instructor
Willow
Quinn
Jessie Pratt
Professor Dinkins
Jeffrey Labrecque
Fletch Huxley
Nanette Ulster

Most Ridiculous Local Shops
The “artisanal cheese shop Quel Fromage!”
Or
���The Pump, a musclehead gym”

Most Noticeable Plot-Holes and Nonsense
Either:

“Hanna’s eyes widened. How did Colleen know Liam was a player?”

“Whoa. What if Tabitha’s family and friends somehow found out Tabitha hadn’t died from an alcohol overdose?”

“Emily hadn’t been to this mall since two Christmases ago, when she’d agreed to be the mall’s Santa.”

Mike wandered over to a table of satin bras, held an enormous pink one to his chest, and started striking exaggerated poses. Hanna snickered. Mike
used to do that all the time when they went shopping together, and it never failed to crack her up

“Whoever they were dealing with was diabolical and brilliant.”

Not only does it now seem that the 12th book won’t be the last, but the afterword to this book promises that it will take place on a cruise-ship as all the characters return to the scene of the JI for reasons of massive stupidity. Having informed me of this, Shepard concludes her witterings with the verbal equivalent of a slap in the reader’s face: actually writing “Anchors aweigh!” I could not be less excited about the upcoming publication of her latest money-spinning pile of vacuousity. Yet it rolls inexorably nearer, an unrelenting spectre of materialism, vanity and inanity.