PRETTY LITTLE LIARS by Sara Shepard

Aria, Emily, Spencer, Hanna and Alison have been best friends since the third grade. They go everywhere together, thinking no-one can come between them. If anyone is the ringleader of the group it is Alison, and the other girls cannot help but confide all their secrets to her.

One night, during a sleepover, Alison goes missing. Her body is never found. The girls mourn her death but move apart after time, assuming their secrets have disappeared with Alison too.

Three years later and Aria is having an affair with her teacher; Emily is questioning her sexuality; Hanna is a thief; and Spencer is flirting with her sister's fiance. They all think their secrets are safe, until they starting receiving messages from the mysterious A - who knows exactly what they are all up to, and is threatening to spill the beans . . .

I have to admit that I'm a sucker for a story that contains some sort of secret, or secrets. So it's no surprise that I was very interested in reading this book. :)

Alison, Spencer, Emily, Aria, and Hanna used to be a group of tight-knit friends. They hung out together, got up to mischief together, and were starting their teenage years together. However, when Alison disappears one day, their group falls apart. Now, three years later, each of the girls belongs to a diferent group of friends and try to avoid each other as much as they can.

Spencer is looking forward to moving into the barnhouse at the back of her parent's house, but when she meets her sister's boyfriend, she can't keep her eyes off him. Emily is on the swimteam and has a boyfriend, but when a new girl moves into Alison's old house, she can't help but find herself being attracted to her. Aria has just returned from Iceland and is settling back into the old suburb, when she meets her ideal guy... only to find out he's her English teacher. Hanna has lost all of her chubbiness and has become one of the prettiest girls in school, though she has an appetite for breaking the law and still craves junk food.

Each of the girls has their own troubled and very twisted complication to deal with. But when they each start getting emails and texts from someone calling themselves A, their lives get turned upside down. See, A knows all of the individual little secrets, things that each shared with Alison. So, when they start to wonder if Alison has somehow come back, that theory gets tossed out the window when the missing girl's body is finally found in her former backyard.

Paranoid and distraught, the four friends wind up coming together. Now that they know it can't be Alison who's taunting them, they can't help but wonder who is... and why? That's a great question, because I can't wait to find out myself. 

Told in the POV of each of the girls, this book is so well written that I got totally caught up in each girl's life without losing touch of each one's details. Also, although each girl gets caught up in their own sinful situation, I still liked them. It's not that they're evil, they're just young and complicated. This is a fascinating story told in such a unique way that I can't help but be hooked!

Pretty Little Liars is a scandalous rollercoaster ride of actions, entanglements, emotions, friendship lost and found, as well as a tangled web of secrets. It seems like every single character in this book has a dirty, little secret hidden away, something they're terrified someone else will find out. And the strange thing is that A seems to know all of them. But you know what? In spite of everything that's going on, this book was a lot of wicked fun, and for that I enjoyed every second of it.

This one's a keeper, and I'm afraid that I'm already hooked on this series. Loved it! I. Must. Find. Out. What's. Going. On. And what is The Jenna Thing? :)

Pretty Little Liars: PLL #1, January 2011, ISBN 9781907410871, Atom Paperback