Review: Wicked

Title: Wicked
Author: Sara Shepard
Publisher: HarperTeen
Pages: 310
Series: Pretty Little Liars #5
Rating: 4 stars
**Warning: Spoilers for earlier books in the series.**
From the book jacket: 
In idyllic Rosewood, Pennsylvania, where Burberry earmuffs keep diamond-studded ears warm, four very pretty girls have done some very wicked things...

High school juniors Hanna, Spencer, Emily, and Aria have paid dearly for their sins. A stalker named "A" terrorized them for months and revealed their darkest secrets. But now that A's true identity has been revealed, the girls can finally go back to their pretty little lives.

Only, once a pretty little liar, always a pretty little liar - and these girls just can't help but be bad. Hanna will do anything to be Rosewood's queen bee. Spencer's digging up her family's secrets. Emily can't stop thinking about her new boyfriend. And Aria approves a little too strongly of her mom's taste in men.

As the secrets get darker and the scandals juicier, the consequences turn deadly. After all, girls who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. And in Rosewood, someone is always watching...

**********

I am enjoying these books, but I must confess, the book jacket descriptions are really annoying. I think the characters are all relatable to some degree (some more than others), but the jacket copies make the books sound like they're about a bunch of super-popular witchy gossip-queen girls who are all about doing every awful thing they can think of. (Only one of them is like that, and even then not the "do every bad thing she can think of" part. I mean, Hanna is my least favorite character, but she's not evil.)

However, jacket flap aside, I enjoyed Wicked. It went by too quickly! One thing about these books is that the plotlines all run right into each other and it's sometimes hard to pick out the one definite story arc that defines each novel as independent of the others. Or maybe it's just that there's so much going on! At any rate, I definitely want to read Killer ASAP.

Sara Shepard really does an excellent job of establishing mysteries that leave you wanting to know more, and she doesn't give us too many clues. All too often I figure out the plots of stories way before the characters do, and I love that with this series, I haven't. Okay, so the jacket flap pretty much gave away what each of the girls are going to be up to in the novel (even if the issue in question doesn't come up until halfway through the book), but I still don't know who New A is or who killed Ali or anything like that. I haven't solved the big mysteries yet.

I feel like I'm rambling a bit. This is probably the least coherent review I've posted to date (I blame the fact that I've been really busy and consequently sleep-deprived, although it's probably just that I'm in a rambly mood today). But to sum up my review of Wicked in just a couple of sentences: Definitely an excellent continuation of the series, but I'm starting to think that I'd enjoy these books a lot more if I just gave up on reading the covers.

Links: 
Pretty Little Liars website